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Legacy of Bush; Trump at G-20; Trump Not Confronting Putin or Crown Prince. Aired 6:30-7:00a ET

Aired December 04, 2018 - 06:30   ET

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

[06:30:00] DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Guy but who always thought about moving the country forward. And I look at that emotion that we see in 43 in President Bush and I remember that image of the father standing over the son when the son was in the Oval Office for the first time, in the chair of the Oval Office. Such a moment of pride and love. And that love and support, even during the tough times of the Gulf War of the second Gulf War, was something that loomed large for this son as a measure of support from his dad.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, friends, thank you all for being here and sharing in this moment. We know you'll be here throughout the day and throughout tomorrow.

And we should note, we're going to speak to George P. Bush, you know, Texas political figure, the grandson.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: That's right. Eldest grandson. And just that special relationship. I can't wait to hear more about it because his grandchildren loved him.

BERMAN: And I think he had a unique relationship with each and every one of them, too. So very special.

Other political news, a review of ballots by CNN has uncovered a strange pattern amid an election fraud investigation in North Carolina. Could this all lead to a new election?

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[06:35:10] BERMAN: We have some breaking news this morning.

France now says it will suspend fuel tax hikes that sparked weeks of violent, deadly protests. The prime minister was supposed to meet with representatives of the so-called Yellow Vest Movement to find ways to diffuse tensions about higher taxes and living costs, but that meeting has now been canceled. The protests have left at least three dead and more than 260 injured. Hundreds more have been arrested.

CAMEROTA: In just hours, CIA Director Gina Haspel will brief a small group of lawmakers on the murder of "Washington Post" journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This comes after senators were upset, you'll remember, that Haspel was not part of that full Senate briefing last week. President Trump has rejected the CIA assessment that the Saudi crown prince personally ordered Khashoggi's murder. BERMAN: CNN has learned that the death of the top commander overseeing

U.S. Naval forces in the Middle East appears to be a suicide. The body of Vice Admiral Scott Stearney was found at his home in Bahrain over the weekend. Stearney described as a devoted father and husband, led U.S. operations in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. A Defense Department official says Stearney was not under investigation. There were no signs of foul play.

CAMEROTA: Just horrible.

A CNN investigation is revealing an unusual pattern in that North Carolina House race that is mired in controversy, while election officials are looking into these allegations that absentee ballots were tampered with in the Ninth Congressional District. CNN has obtained 161 ballots and discovered the same nine people signed at least ten ballots each. Of those nine people, some are linked to a political operative who worked for the campaign of Mark Harris. He was the projected Republican winner. In North Carolina, witnesses must sign absentee ballots, but they are usually family or friends. Election officials are considering a possible do over in the race. A ruling is expected later this month and, of course, we'll stay on this.

BERMAN: Yes, you know, people say voter fraud. This is actually election fraud. The allegations here, or what people suspect, is that maybe there were political operatives who were trying to rig the game, not people trying to vote twice, but campaigns trying to make this happen.

CAMEROTA: Yes, and the evidence suggests that at the moment, but, of course, we will follow that.

BERMAN: All right, President Trump appears to be cutting back on foreign travel compared to his predecessors. What message does this send to others around the world? That's next.

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[06:41:27] CAMEROTA: So, what came out of last week's G-20 Summit? The visuals were attention grabbing, some of them. President Trump seemed at times subdued, even awkward. Here's -- take a look at this moment. This is when the president made a swift exit from the stage after shaking the hand of Argentina's president, who was hosting the international summit. You see the Argentinian president trying to get him back there because President Trump was expected to stick around for a welcome photo op.

This comes as "The Washington Post" writes that President Trump has been trying to curtail his foreign trips and that the president is, quote, diminishing foreign travel. It reflects a president scaling back foreign ambition.

Let's talk about all of this with Richard Haass. He is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as chief Middle East and south Asia adviser of the White House National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush. Good morning, Richard.

AMB. RICHARD HAASS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: Good morning, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: What is the upshot of the G-20? What came out of it from where you watched?

HAASS: Well, the actual G-20 accomplishes almost nothing. It's a meeting. There's no real follow-up. It's not an organization or an institution. The communique was a piece of Swiss cheese, big -- you know, with big holes in it.

What's really important about the G-20 is, it's an occasion for people to have one-on-one meetings. In this case, the most important meeting was that between the president of the United States and the president of China, and the absence of meetings between the president of the United States and either Mr. Putin or the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

CAMEROTA: Well, let's talk about this because here's your tweet. You said there's a patter to the foreign policy of Trump. We have seen it with North Korea, NAFTA and now China. He creates a sense of crisis, compromises, and claims he accomplished more than he did and deserves credit for having diffused the crisis that he largely created.

So as it relates to that meeting -- with -- well, whatever happened with China, you know, President Trump claims that they did move the ball forward in terms of agreeing to discuss intellectual property, agreeing to hold off on more tariffs, sort of forestalling any kind of trade war. How did you see it?

HAASS: It's a 90-day truce. Basically the United States introduced higher tariffs. China retaliated. We then threatened to do more. We've pulled back. They've pulled back for 90 days. But I'll be honest with you, almost all the outstanding issues don't lend themselves to the kind of negotiation where they're going to be resolved in 90 days. So we can declare victory, but essentially we didn't accomplish a whole lot of anything.

CAMEROTA: So basically it's your feeling that President Trump claims that he's made big accomplishments with, say, North Korea after he meets with Kim Jong-un or President Xi, but that it's not in writing, that these things are just left kind of hanging?

HAASS: It is a moment in diplomacy, Alisyn, where, you know, Henry Kissinger used to call it strategic ambiguity and sometimes that can help. But as we saw in Helsinki with Putin or in Singapore with Kim Jong-un, if you walk out of a meeting and you each have a different sense of what the other guy agreed to and what your obligations are, you're simply setting yourself up for frustration.

Take North Korea. We -- the president can say we've accomplished denuclearization, but the last I checked not only has North Korea not moved in that direction, but it's actually moved farther away from it. And that, again, is the problem of having meetings that have, say, no staff in the room, no clear communique and no serious follow-up.

CAMEROTA: I want to ask you about this moment that has gotten so much attention, and that was Mohammad bin Salman greeting Vladimir Putin. And they were beaming. I mean, they publicly are sort of high-fiving each other. You know, many people have never seen Vladimir Putin smiling this broadly. What message did you take from that moment?

[06:45:11] HAASS: Well, you have something of a pariahs club and, you know, there they are. You know, what they have in common is they murder political opponents. It's a real indictment, though, also of the United States. It shows what happens if we don't -- if we don't make the embrace of protection of values and human life a centerpiece of our foreign policy, what happens is tyrants around the world essentially run with that and they use it as license to do what both of these individuals have done. And to some ways a large statement, this is a signal of what a post-American world looks like. We have less influence. Our values have more sway. This, to me, was a truly depressing or discouraging moment of the G-20.

CAMEROTA: Max Boot, conservative columnist said tyrants are laughing at the U.S. Do you agree?

HAASS: I don't know if they're laughing at us, but essentially they don't feel they pay any price for their tyranny. There's no penalty particularly in their bilateral relationship with us. They get invited to international gatherings. They ought not to have legitimacy. They ought not to have normal relationships with us. But, again, they seem to be having their cake and eating it.

CAMEROTA: Well, let's talk about that. So it's been two months since Jamal Khashoggi's murder and, as I think you've heard President Trump say, that Saudi Arabia is so strategically important to the U.S. no more is going to be done to retaliate. Do you think that they've -- I mean when I've questioned Trump surrogates or people from the administration, they've said, oh, but we have sanctioned them. We've sanctioned the 17 Saudis. They can no longer travel to the U.S. Their assets are going to be frozen. Is that enough?

HAAS: That's -- of course not. That's preposterous. The idea that these people acted on their own is just silly. The fact that there were 11 phone calls between the crown prince and the guy in charge of the killing of Khashoggi all just before and after the killing, obviously this was carried out at the behest of the crown prince.

Perhaps just as important, this idea that Saudi Arabia is so pivotal we have to essentially let them get away with it. I don't see it. Why are they such a great American ally? They started a war in Yemen that is a strategic and humanitarian disaster. They've divided the Arab world. They don't have a relationship any more with Canada. They haven't delivered anything on the peace process. Their oil output is not nearly as significant as it was. What am I missing here?

But this idea that Saudi Arabia is so important that we have to essentially put aside our own preferences and values, I just don't buy it, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Richard, of course, you worked with Bush 41. So tell us what you think his legacy is.

HAASS: I think his legacy in foreign policy is on one hand the importance of American leadership, that the world does not organize itself without the United States, but also the importance of multilateralism. He didn't do it alone. He did it with others. Whether it was the peaceful end of the Cold War, bringing Germany -- a united Germany into NATO, the entire management of the Gulf crisis after Saddam Hussein conquered Kuwait, the way Bush brought together this unprecedented international coalition and liberated Kuwait. Any number of other things.

He was the one who negotiated the NAFTA agreement, did all sorts of work also on environmental issues. And also here at home perhaps just as important was his willingness to reach across the aisle, to show that you could be a bipartisan president and get things done, particularly if you didn't put your own short-term political interests paramount.

My guess is -- and so we're already seeing it -- history will see him as not just the most successful one-term president in American history, but I actually think history is going to see him as one of the better presidents in American history and one who really played a pivotal moment when the world was transitioning from the era of the Cold War to all that has come after it.

CAMEROTA: Ambassador Richard Haass, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for being on.

HAASS: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: John.

BERMAN: All right, the president's statements on Twitter about Michael Cohen and Roger Stone, what did late night make of it? The answer, a lot. That's next.

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[06:53:07] BERMAN: So, when the president vents his spleen about Michael Cohen and also talks about Roger Stone, you just know the late night comics are going to get into it.

CAMEROTA: Oh, you do.

BERMAN: These are your late night laughs.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JIMMY FALLON, HOST, "THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JIMMY FALLON: President Trump returned home from the G-20 Summit in Argentina. And just to mess with him, his staffers trashed the Oval Office and told him there was an FBI raid. There was nothing we could do, Mr. President, there was so many of them. And they had guns.

STEPHEN COLBERT, HOST, "THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT": In a surprise twist, Cohen doesn't want to go to jail. His lawyers argued that in exchange for his cooperation with Robert Mueller, Cohen should be spared prison for crimes he committed in an abundance of enthusiasm for Trump. Yes, an abundance of enthusiasm. So unlike the women he paid off for Trump, Cohen wasn't faking it.

JIMMY KIMMEL, HOST, "JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE": Trump wants Roger Stone to know he has his back. And, by the way, you know you're in trouble when one of the only people you can count on is this guy, this -- the guy who framed Roger Rabbit is your only friend.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: You really can't go wrong with closing with Roger Stone and his picture.

BERMAN: No. No, I have to say, you know, Roger Stone we know has a Nixon tattoo. Do we know whether he has a Trump tattoo yet? Because then it would be official.

CAMEROTA: And where on his body it might be?

BERMAN: We'll get on that.

CAMEROTA: Are we? Do we really want to find out?

BERMAN: We have our best people on that.

CAMEROTA: Oh, boy.

OK, moving on.

Americans are continuing to pay their respects to President George H.W. Bush, who is lying in state at the U.S. Capitol. We have new details on a truce between the Bush family and President Trump.

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[06:58:53] (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. PAUL RYAN (R), HOUSE SPEAKER: He showed us that how we live is as important as what we achieve. His life was a hymn of honor.

DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: It's almost like we're watching a vanished world. He came from a different generation.

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D), MINORITY LEADER: I knew him to be a fine man. Even when he opposed your views, you knew he was doing what he thought was best for the United States of America.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mueller is going to show what Michael Flynn has been talking about for a year.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Clearly the president is saying, if you cross me, you're a rat, but if you stand with me, you're going to get taken care of.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You will not bear false witness against the president, that's a positive thing to say.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That type of pattern is something that we call obstruction of justice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

CAMEROTA: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to your NEW DAY.

John and I are in Washington, D.C., for a very special week here.

Former president George H.W. Bush lies in state this morning at the U.S. Capitol. These are live pictures that you're looking at. This is inside the rotunda with the honor guard watching over his flag-draped casket.

[06:59:57] BERMAN: That is the changing of the honor guard that you're watching live pictures of right now as they change shifts, which happens every few hours there. It's been going on all right.

CAMEROTA: Look at this vantage point. I mean it's so dramatic