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Trump to Bypass Congress, Declare Emergency to Fund Wall; McCabe Reveals Bombshells on Trump Administration in Tell-All Book; CentCom Commander Disagrees with Pulling U.S. Troops Out of Syria; Interview with Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired February 15, 2019 - 07:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The plan is now set for the president to declare a national emergency.

[07:00:07] REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA), CHAIRMAN, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: It's hard to imagine a worse case for a national emergency than a problem that has been diminishing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What about if somebody else thinks the climate change is the national emergency? How far will they go?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: People in the Justice Department were having serious discussions about whether the president had to be removed.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Andy McCabe lied under oath, faces a criminal referral from the inspector general.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They all pull together, and they all want to take the president down.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Amazon is pulling out of Long Island City. A huge blow to the governor and the mayor.

GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D), NEW YORK: You want to diversify your economy, we need Amazon.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D), NEW YORK: We should not be giving away our infrastructure to a company that has not shown good faith.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning and welcome to your NEW DAY. A history-making day, a precedent-setting day, and also according to some, a dangerous day.

Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, scores of other Republicans have all expressed horror at the notion of a president going around Congress on immigration. But today, President Trump is going around Congress on immigration. The president expected to declare a national emergency to reallocate

billions of dollars to fund his proposed border wall. The Constitution gives Congress the power to appropriate money, but Congress is giving the president only a fraction of the funds he wants for a barrier -- and it's just a fence, not a wall -- so the president is making an end run.

Democrats are already vowing to challenge the president's declaration. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is warning the president this move will set a dangerous precedent.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And it is not only House Speaker Pelosi who doesn't like it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had been warning the White House against it; had said the action is ideologically opposed by many Republicans in his chamber and that it faces a very real chance of being blocked.

But, in a surprising twist, "The Washington Post" today reports it was actually Mitch McConnell who ultimately sold President Trump on the deal, promising to support this emergency declaration.

Plus, the commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East publicly breaking with President Trump over his decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria.

BERMAN: All right. Joining us now, Mike Rogers. He was the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Susan Glasser, a staff writer at "The New Yorker" and a CNN global affairs analyst. And Jeffrey Toobin, CNN chief legal analyst.

Jeffrey Toobin, why is this a big deal, what we are going to see in just a few hours, the president declaring a national emergency? Why is this the type of thing that 2014 Donald Trump, 2014 Mike Pence, all sorts of Republicans for the last 20 years have warned is dangerous?

TOOBIN: In 1952, at the height of the Korean War, there was a strike in the steel -- in the steel industry, and the -- President Truman tried to get Congress to give him the authority to seize the mills and keep them going. And Congress said no. He did it anyway.

And in one of the most famous Supreme Court opinions of all time, in 1952, the steel seizure case, the Supreme Court said, "President Truman, you can't do that." That unless the president acts with specific authorization under the Constitution, a president cannot act in this way.

This is one of the profound issues of how America is governed. Congress has the power of the purse. The president executes and spends that money.

Here we have a situation where Congress very explicitly said, "We are not spending money on this border barrier." The president's going to do it anyway, and now we're going to see whether that is actually allowed to proceed.

BERMAN: Where'd you hear authoritarian? Is that an appropriate word here?

TOOBIN: You know, I don't deal in --

CAMEROTA: Hyperbole.

TOOBIN: -- epithets like that. But I mean, I think it is -- it is a profound issue of American governance. Who controls the purse? Who decides how money should be spent?

You know, if there was a Republican Party instead of just a Trump party, this would be an issue they would be interested in. But it is no longer a Republican Party, and so they are going to fall into line. Mitch McConnell first in line, and we'll see what the courts do.

CAMEROTA: Mike Rogers, explain that. Explain how Republicans very recently used to go ballistic about what they perceived as executive overreach and how they could be on board with this today.

MIKE ROGERS, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY COMMENTATOR: Well, I can't explain it candidly, and I was one of those that was not happy with the Obama administration when he said, "I have a phone and a pen and I'll go around Congress." And I thought that was very unhealthy for the democracy of which we enjoy.

And I'll say this. As a chairman who used reprogramming, I mean, there's several ways you can get what you need to do in oversight from the administration. Diplomacy. Now it's social media whining, is one way to do it.

The other way is subpoena. And the most important way, and the most effective and the way I used most often was control over reprogramming dollars.

[07:05:07] And so if Congress gives up this ability to control that, they will lose an important oversight function. And I'm a big believer in that separate but equal branch of government. Not every administration gets it right, Republican or Democrat. This is a huge federal government. It needs a functioning Congress. I argue that they ought to be as angry as anything about the process here.

There's another bite at this apple the president will get in the fall, and I don't understand why they're going to pick this fight for the sole purposes of picking a fight now.

Susan, you've looked at this and what's going on in the last week and you say the Republicans have given up all their power already. They've given up everything, except you say, prayer.

SUSAN GLASSER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, that's right. I mean, I was really struck yesterday when they were beginning debate in the Senate on this spending bill, compromised, forged in Congress, and Senator Chuck Grassley was on the floor of the Senate. And he basically said, "Let's please all pray, everyone in the Senate, that President Trump does the right thing and signs this spending bill."

And it's almost as though they've given up any pretense of being able to manage, essentially, an unmanageable president. And what it really does underscore is, in particular, Republicans who control the Senate. They're ceding away institutional powers now in a way that suggests there's going to be a real conflict.

My -- I suspect strongly and have talked to the Republicans who told me they actually are hoping that the courts and expecting that the courts will step in, in fact, here and do what Republicans on Capitol Hill were unable to do, which is to provide a constitutional check on the president.

And -- but to me that's a very potentially dangerous situation where you have one branch of government essentially abdicating and hoping that another branch steps in.

TOOBIN: And also, by the way, may not step in.

ROGERS: Right.

TOOBIN: I mean, it is not -- you know, we don't know how this will be resolved in the courts.

And if you look at Brett Kavanaugh, for example, the core belief that he has expressed as a judge in the D.C. Circuit before he was promoted to the Supreme Court was expansive executive power. And that was not a small reason why he was appointed to the Supreme Court.

So the idea that the courts will step in and restore the constitutional balance may happen; it may not.

CAMEROTA: Mike Rogers, the backstory of how Mitch McConnell has worked his way around in the space of two weeks do this about-face where he was publicly admonishing the president not to do a national emergency, that Congress would push back that it would be very contentious, it would be very bad; to yesterday saying that he supports this idea.

The backstory, according to "The Washington Post" this morning, is that the deal was unraveling. As yesterday morning, President Trump wasn't going to sign it. He had decided he'd heard enough criticism about this bipartisan deal that he didn't like it and Mitch McConnell had to call him three times to try to spin it whereby it could -- the narrative could somehow be that Democrats lost, that the president won and Democrats lost. And that's when Mitch McConnell decided that he would encourage the president to try to find $8 billion in some other pot that I guess is lying around somewhere in Congress and declare this national emergency.

ROGER: Yes, I mean, I think this is -- you know, you're watching Mitch McConnell eat a manure sandwich in this whole process.

I think what he said is, listen, I'm weighing that -- the fact that another government shutdown is pretty damaging, you know, to the country -- and I think he believes that -- and also the party. The Republican Party as it stands today. And I think he probably thought, if I can get past this, I'll deal with the other. And the other being the president's interest in a national emergency. So I think that's exactly what happened. And you can tell in the

mannerisms, the body languages in the -- and the language itself of Mitch McConnell that he's where he is, because he thought it expedient to make sure that the government didn't shutdown.

I think think that's what you're seeing. I'm hoping that there are folks working on the president now to try to get him to understand that take this as a temporary win, build on it, and there are reprogramming dollars that you could access throughout the year.

And reprogramming basically means, you know, Congress said you can spend a thousand dollars for this cup. They don't need a thousand dollars for the cups come around October. Those agencies can come back and say, "I don't want to spend that on that cup. I don't need it. But I'd like too to spend it on 'X'."

And that gets -- Congress continues to be in the oversight role, but it also spends more efficiently money that wouldn't necessarily need to be spent. So, listen, I'm hoping that's where McConnell is.

And if you see it, this isn't a full-throated support of the national emergency. It's kind of a "Well, you know, whatever." I think that's what you're seeing happen. And he's not enjoying that manure sandwich right yet this morning, I'm sure.

[07:10:05] BERMAN: I'm not sure one ever does, especially at 7:09 a.m., Mike Rogers.

Susan Glasser, there is also the issue of whether this is, in fact, an emergency here. Just as a factual matter, the president will declare in less than three hours there's an emergency.

And I just want to show people arrests at the southern border. And this chart is very relevant today as it is every day. Arrests at the Southern border are at or near an historic low. Ticked up slightly from last year, but still a fraction of what it was in the year 2000. So at or near a historic low is what he will call an emergency.

And by the way, the immigrants being arrester or obtained at the border now, they're presenting themselves. They're families asking for asylum. A wall doesn't necessarily stop people from saying, "Hey, I'm here."

GLASSER: You know what? I mean, look there is no more factual national emergency than it's a victory for President Trump. You know, it's the exact opposite of either.

And I don't think that the courts are going to be fooled by that record. It is as clear cut a case of a president seeking to bypass a Congress where he could not achieve his legislative goals as I've ever seen in public life.

You know, I'm talking to you today from Munich. The security conference here has brought together world leaders from around the world. You know, they think the national emergency is a president who is destabilizing the United States and, at the same time, unraveling American alliances so that there's a real uncertainty about American leadership internationally, as well as at home.

And I think the idea of just preemptively declaring a national emergency, throwing the world's biggest super power into this kind of disarray and order to get a few billion dollars for a wall that nobody thinks is actually going to happen, you know, it's -- it's an element of fantasticalness to our politics that I think we're pretty reckless in accepting.

This is just absolutely something that is not normal. But I think that emergency may be mischaracterized right now.

CAMEROTA: Jeffrey, let's talk quickly about Andrew McCabe. He has a big interview with "60 Minutes" this weekend. And one of the things that "60 Minutes" put out as a tease is that the 25th Amendment, the one that says that the president could be removed for being unfit somehow, was actually a real conversation.

We've heard this in the past, that people had kind of toyed with it or that it came up. But Andrew McCabe seems to be spelling out that it was a real conversation that they were having and, I guess the question is was this just about James Comey's firing or was there something else that made them have that conversation?

TOOBIN: Well, I think it was the whole package of facts around James Comey's firing, especially related to Russia.

That, you know, what McCabe has said is that he was looking at the entire scope of the relationship between the new president and Russia and then seeing how he fired -- fired Comey over the Russia investigation.

And this profound worry that the president was a counterintelligence risk, that he was, perhaps, not doing the bidding of the United States but doing the bidding of Russia.

It is exactly what Adam Schiff has been saying about why he's doing an investigation in the House Intelligence Committee. This issue has not gone away, which is the stuff of spy fiction, which is like which side is the president on?

BERMAN: Jeffrey, Susan, Chairman, thank you very, very much.

CAMEROTA: All right. We do have some breaking news right now. First on CNN, the top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East is publicly breaking with President Trump. General Joseph Votel, who leads the war against ISIS, tells CNN that he disagreed with the president's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and insists the terror group is not defeated.

CNN's Barbara Starr is live in Oman with all of the breaking details. What did he tell you, Barbara?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, good morning, Alisyn.

We've been traveling with General Votel through the Persian Gulf as he meets with allies. And the question that is front and center so much in this region is what happens next in Syria.

General Votel making it very clear this morning, with very direct words, how and why he disagreed with the president.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STARR: Did you feel as the CentCom commander that it was, in fact, time to start bringing troops home?

GEN. JOSEPH VOTEL, U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND: It would not have been my -- my military advice at that particular time. And I would not have made that suggestion.

Capabilities, the pressure, the approach that we've had in place has been working, and so we were -- we were keen to kind of stay along that track and make sure that we finish the mission for which we were assigned.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STARR: Now they actually hope that the U.S.-backed fighters will take back the last ISIS enclave in southern Syria in the coming days. [07:15:04] There has been additional progress since the president's December decision was announced to withdraw U.S. troops.

But Votel, you know, making it clear he disagreed but he is moving ahead. He is a serving four-star general. He obeys the commander in chief. There is no question about that. He is bringing all U.S. troops out of Syria.

BERMAN: Barbara Starr.

STARR: Alisyn, John.

BERMAN: Barbara, thank you very much. Still, a remarkable airing of a public disagreement there from an active serving general.

Up next, we're going to speak to a Republican member of Congress in the Freedom Caucus who voted against the spending deal to prevent the shutdown. What does he think about the new declaration of a national emergency?

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BERMAN: In just hours President Trump is expected to declare a national emergency to reallocate billions of dollars for his border wall, because the spending bill he will sign today does not include enough money for it. Republicans, some, are warning the president against this move.

Joining me now is Republican Congressman Chip Roy. He is a member of the House Freedom Caucus and also a hard-working and long-time lawyer who has written, it turns out, extensively on the use of executive power when it comes to immigration.

[07:20:12] Let me read you something you wrote on February 3, 2016, in "The Texas Tribune," when President Obama was accused of going around Congress on immigration. You wrote: "This is not an immigration question. This really is a separation of powers question. It's actually breathtaking, from our perspective, the impact that this can have on the power of the executive going forward if it's not properly checked. There are times when it's important to directly stand up for this core balance of power that's so critical."

And yet, you support the president declaring a national emergency today. Why?

REP. CHIP ROY (R), TEXAS: Well, good morning. Thanks for having me on.

First of all, let me just focus on the emergency that we have at our border. We do have an emergency. I've spent some significant time down there.

There's about 400,000 people that are going to be flowing through the Rio Grande Valley this year alone, of whom only 200,000 will be apprehended. The other 200,000, 90 percent will be caught and released. Fifty-four people found in a stash house in Houston who were being held ransom by the cartels. Humanitarian crisis, American citizens at risk. So there are real issues at play here.

But -- but the balance of power matters. I do think that the president ought to take a long hard look at what's going on. I wouldn't sign this bill. I think this bill actually undermines the president in making an emergency declaration, because he's signing a flawed bill. That's why I voted against it. I don't think the bill does what it needs to do to secure the border, and if I were the president, I would veto it.

With respect to what you just described, I was a part of the litigation effort as part of the attorney general's office in Texas to stop President Obama's DAPA executive action. That was an overreach by the executive. There was no lawful basis for it. The Fifth Circuit agreed. The Supreme Court agreed. We showed that the president created benefits where they didn't exist. There was no law backing it up.

In this case, we have a law that Congress passed that does give the president some significant authority on top of his constitutional authority to declare an emergency.

But I'm going to take a long hard look at what the executive branch does. I'm going to be honest with you. I haven't seen it yet. I have a Constitutional duty to review and make sure that whatever they do is within the four corners of the law, and I intend to do that.

BERMAN: Are you uncomfortable with the use of executive authority here?

ROY: Well, I think that we should always be a little suspect of executive authority as a member of Congress. I think we should look at it carefully. I very much believed that when President Obama overreached, and I want

to look at what the president wants to do here. But let's be clear. Congress abandoned its job to do what is necessary to secure the border. Both sides of the aisle, by the way.

BERMAN: But that's a different issue about whether or not the president has the executive authority do it. And let me ask you about what some Republicans have warned against.

Say in five years, in eight years, if there's a President Kamala Harris, a President Elizabeth Warren, they look at global warming and climate change; they see sea levels rising in Florida, where there are U.S. military bases. U.S. military personnel at risk because of rising sea level because of climate change. What's to keep them from declaring a national emergency on the very same basis that the president is doing it today?

ROY: Well, those hypotheticals are usually based in some sort of strange facts that you'd have to look at some time in the future. What I'd look at right now is what is the emergency --

BERMAN: Congressman -- Congressman, it's really very similar. In that case we're talking apples to apples there.

ROY: No --

BERMAN: If the emergency is the perception of the president of the United States, which is what is at question here, if the president decides it's an emergency, can he or she invoke these executive powers?

ROY: These are -- these are not apples to apples that we're talking about. What we're talking about here is a very specific question about whether or not we have an emergency at our border today and whether the president has the authority under the law given to it by Congress and under the Constitution to take action.

There clearly, given the numbers of times under the Bush administration, Obama administration, repeatedly over the years, 58 times or some very large number, where there's been an effort under the National Emergencies Act for the president to operate. That does happen.

And the question here is, do we have a critical nexus for the cartels that are engaged with FARC and terrorist activities, where they're reaching up into our communities, moving fentanyl across the border, endangering American citizens. And Congress refusing to do its job. Does the president have the authority to do it?

I will wait and see and look at what the president puts forward. And I think all members of Congress, regardless of party, ought do that.

BERMAN: Let me ask --

ROY: I think we ought to be very careful about it, but we ought to be cognizant that we do have an emergency situation at the border, and we ought do our job. And I'm, frankly, embarrassed that Congress didn't do its job in this case.

BERMAN: Let me ask you, because you keep talking about an emergency, and just tell our viewers, as we have so many times in the past, you talked about fentanyl moving over the border, which is a huge problem. The vast majority of drugs, the vast majority of fentanyl and other narcotics coming through legal ports of entry, the legal ports of entry, not necessarily over the border where the wall would be.

And let me just ask you another question while I have you at the point. You're saying it's an emergency right now. Let me put this up chart that we keep on showing people, which is this arrests at the border. And you will see arrests at the border in 2018 at or near an historic low.

[07:25:05] You are calling this an emergency. Was it more of an emergency in the year 2000 when the arrests at the border were five times what they are now?

ROY: So this data doesn't reflect at all the reality on the ground. Have you spoken to the Border Patrol? Have you gone down to the Rio Grande Valley? Have you looked at what's happening with the, literally, thousand people a day that are coming across that are coming into and getting streamed in, in buses, put in detention centers, and then literally turned around in 43 hours and released out into the United States? And that is what we're actually facing on the border.

You're not -- when you talk about the drugs that are trafficked at the ports of entry, yes. But they're also coming through between the ports of entry --

BERMAN: But Congressman -- but Congressman --

ROY: -- and cartels are profiting moving those people across the border. The Gulf Cartel --

BERMAN: I'm not arguing the cartels aren't profiting. I'm not arguing that they're coming. What the data from the government, the Customs and Border Protection Agency that you're telling us to speak to, and we have spoken to them, the data shows us that there are fewer people being arrested for coming over illegally now, vastly fewer than there were 15, 16 years ago.

And I'm just asking you, by those numbers, is there less of an emergency now than there was then?

ROY: No. Because listen, the nature of who's coming across the border. The data's always played with, by the way. But the nature of who's coming across the border matters.

BERMAN: This is -- this is the very people -- hang on. You say the data is being played with here. I just want to tell you, this is the data from the group you are telling me to listen to.

ROY: But -- no. What it matters to is -- what matters is who's coming across. In Tamaulipas, the state right across the river from Brownsville, McAllen, it is a level four state. That is a no-travel zone under the State Department. Why?

Because the Gulf Cartel has operational control. They're literally endangering the lives of American citizens and the migrants who seek to come here.

I talked to two little boys who slept in a park in Reynosa, who then had to pay the cartels to get across the river. Then all of that group ends up into a stash house in Houston.

BERMAN: And that's horrible.

ROY: They're in danger.

BERMAN: And that's horrible, and we do listen, again, to the Trump administration and the Customs and Border Patrol about who is coming over now and how it's different than 15 years ago.

The major way it's different is that it's people presenting themselves at the border. Presenting themselves in a way that I don't understand how a wall would stop. They're showing up and saying, "I'm here." They're not trying to sneak over.

ROY: Well, because that -- that ignores the reality that, if you have the fencing, the structures and the physical assets in place for the Border Patrol to be able to do their job, then their estimates this year of 200,000 people coming through the Rio Grande Valley sector and not being apprehended, that would be helped -- they would help them stop that. And it would put more resources and focus at the ports of entry, because they wouldn't have to go play Whack-a-mole along a river that they can't even drive next to. People don't know they can't drive parallel to the river. They actually see thousands of people come across the river they never apprehend, because they can't get to it.

And all the drones and technology in the world will not stop that, because they literally can't go get to the port of -- to the place where people are crossing.

We've got a real issue at the border. And fentanyl and cocaine, we stop busts all of the time coming between the ports of entry.

So this is what's at stake. And I just don't understand why this is such a hard debate. We've got a real issue at the border if you talk to the people who are down there. And we ought to just do our sovereign duty as a nation to secure the boarder.

BERMAN: Congressman Chip Roy from Texas, thank you very much for being with us this morning. Come back on NEW DAY. It's great to have you.

ROY: Happy to. Thanks for having me on.

BERMAN: You've been working on this for a long time, both in Congress and as a lawyer. So it's fascinating.

ROY: Thank you. BERMAN: Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: All right. A former Democratic senator says the president's national emergency declaration is going nowhere. Well, three hours from now, it's going somewhere, so we're going to ask her what she thinks the Democrats should do next.

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