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Redacted Mueller Report to Be Released Tomorrow; Denver Schools Close as FBI Seeks Woman 'Infatuated' with Columbine Massacre; Paris Authorities Investigate Notre Dame Fire; Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) is Interviewed about His Presidential Campaign Platform. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired April 17, 2019 - 07:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KELLYANNE CONWAY, COUNSELOR TO DONALD TRUMP: Does not exist, and that's collusion.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Vast sums that have already been promised to a relief effort, with the French president saying he hoped to have it done within five years.

[07:00:10] UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was passing by every day for years and never got used to it.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Some of the artifacts were saved by a human chain while the fire was under way.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's already life coming from death.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I find that inspirational.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning, everyone. Welcome to your NEW DAY. John is off this week. Poppy Harlow joins me.

Thanks so much for being here in his stead.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: My pleasure.

CAMEROTA: Great to have you.

HARLOW: Sure.

CAMEROTA: All right. The wait is almost over for the release of the redacted version of the Mueller report tomorrow. CNN has learned that President Trump is telling aides he expects it will back up his claim of, quote, "complete exoneration," end quote.

But one Republican source tells CNN the president is, quote, "going to go bonkers," end quote, when he sees the testimony of current and former White House officials. While those close to the president tell CNN they do not expect any bombshells, some details, of course, could prove embarrassing.

HARLOW: Meantime, a federal judge concerned about transparency says he wants to review DOJ redactions in the Mueller report after its release. That's interesting. A judge is hearing a Freedom of Information Act request to release the full report.

And Democrats are poised to subpoena the Justice Department for that full Mueller report as soon as Friday, so basically right after.

CAMEROTA: All right. Joining us now to talk about all of this, we have Jeffrey Toobin, CNN chief legal analyst; Frank Bruni, "New York Times" op-ed columnist and CNN contributor; and Bianna Golodryga. She is also a CNN contributor. Great to have all of you.

OK, Jeffrey.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, ma'am.

CAMEROTA: I am fascinated by your process. Tomorrow morning --

TOOBIN: My process.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

HARLOW: All we think about.

TOOBIN: You mean my Orangetheory workouts? No. I'm sorry. I thought you wanted to know my whole day.

CAMEROTA: I kind of do want to shadow you, actually, for a day. Tomorrow would be a great day to start.

So tomorrow morning --

TOOBIN: Yes.

CAMEROTA: -- when you get those 400 pages or so in your hot little hands, what's the first thing you search for?

TOOBIN: Redactions. I mean, it's just going to be -- it's the one thing you're going to be able to see easily, because Attorney General Barr has said there will be some sort of color-coded system which tells you what was redacted and for what reason. He has these four categories he's described.

And just as an initial matter, you know, we are going to want to know how much of this was censored. So that's what I'm going to do first.

After that, it starts to get complicated. I guess the next thing you're going to want to know is how did Mueller deal with the question of obstruction of justice? You know, Barr said -- I don't remember the exact words, but he said that it was not the conventional approach. He didn't say yes or no. Did he leave it to Congress? Did he say, "It's too difficult. I can't make up my mind?" All of that, I think, will be fairly easy to resolve.

Next step, I think, is to determine what's new in the report. What are the stories, the incidents, the facts that all of us journalists have not been able to ferret out but are in there?

And then I go to Orangetheory.

CAMEROTA: OK. Well, that's a full day.

HARLOW: -- me. You're not going to get out of the CNN building tomorrow. Just saying. Sorry about that.

Bianna, to you. One thing that's very different from this in previous reporting on the Mueller report is that these will not be anonymous sources. We know from our reporting on it that Bill Barr is not going to make redactions of names just because, you know, it might be unflattering to the president.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Including the president himself.

HARLOW: Including the president's name himself. So that's part of what our Kaitlan Collins is reporting has White House staffers sort of freaked out about this, right, because they've spoken to Mueller, a number of them. McGahn for 30 hours.

GOLODRYGA: Bonkers was the technical term.

HARLOW: Yes. Bonkers was the technical term. Thank you very much. Not anonymous.

GOLODRYGA: Yes. And look, you have over a dozen either current or former staffers who are said to be very nervous about having spent many hours, including Don McGahn, over 30 hours.

Remember, this was sort of happening when Don McGahn spent time with Mueller, unknown to the president. They were surprised by this reporting when it became known a few months ago that Don McGahn had spent this much time with the president [SIC]. You can imagine the president's feelings towards Don McGahn maybe turning quickly come tomorrow when we find out what he said.

But you have other staffers who may be nervous about, "Listen, I was told to be honest. I was honest. I never thought that we'd get to this point where this would be released."

You have a lot of people who may say, "I'm not going to be so sympathetic," because you knew who they're working for.

CAMEROTA: Frank, some of the reporting -- and this one is hard to believe. But officials tell CNN that the president is not expected to read the report himself. His legal experts will read it and tell him what's in there.

FRANK BRUNI, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I'm laughing, because we keep hearing the president prefers pictures to words. I'm imagining someone doing a slide show, you know, with little captions, here's what the report says.

He may not. He doesn't have that sort of discipline or span of attention.

I think this notion of him being mad at people is so interesting, though. Because he's sort of arguing against himself. Right If he's going to tell the public there's nothing here to see and I'm totally exonerated, then how does he get mad at what individual people said and how it made him look? Either there's nothing incriminating or he's mad at people for making him look bad, right?

[07:05:07] TOOBIN: When has Trump ever been intimidated by the idea of arguing Contradictory things? I mean, don't you think it's entirely possible that he'll say, "This is a complete victory," which he will certainly say -- and FOX News will say this shows the whole thing was a scam, a nothing burger -- and "These people who betrayed me are horrible and liars and terrible."

BRUNI: He will absolutely do both.

TOOBIN: Both of those.

BRUNI: I'm just pointing out that that's a sort of paradox or oxymoron there. And he's going to say he's totally exonerated no matter what's in this report.

GOLODRYGA: Yes.

BRUNI: We know that.

TOOBIN: Yes, right.

BRUNI: And the problem is, because Barr came out so early and said something similar to that, a lot of Americans have turned the page and move on.

GOLODRYGA: And not only that, but they've already muddied the waters. Barr himself suggesting that he was going to investigate, perhaps spying that as going on.

So the president wants to be focusing on what led to this, what he believes an illegal investigation, to begin with. So there will be plenty of Contradictory accusations the president will be throwing out.

HARLOW: So politically, even if this is not good for the president, Bianna, it sounds like you're saying you don't think it will move the needle for him much in the court of public opinion?

GOLODRYGA: I think the president believes that he had the first say and the most important say coming out when we got that four-page Barr memo saying that he was, as he likes to say, exonerated. That's not exactly what it was -- what Barr alluded to, and not what Mueller was saying either.

But the president has stuck with that narrative. We know that he likes to drive the news of the day. And he's been doing that for the past couple of weeks. Lump that in with the fact that now he's going to be calling this once again an illegal investigation. I think people, a lot of people, especially the president's supporters, will be tuning out.

TOOBIN: But nothing moves the polls.

BRUNI: Yes.

TOOBIN: We always talk about, "Oh, what are the polls going to do?" The polls haven't changed in two years. You know, we talk about "Oh, it went from 42 to 40 percent." That's all noise.

I mean, the polls on Donald Trump have been stable since he took office. And I can't believe anything in this report is going to change it

HARLOW: Anything.

TOOBIN: I think.

CAMEROTA: Jeffrey, I have a burning question for you. We've all sort of accepted that we're getting this redacted report. Why can't Congress see the unredacted report, as they did with Ken Starr?

TOOBIN: They may.

CAMEROTA: But I mean, why is Congress accepting that they're getting a redacted report? Aren't they -- in their oversight duty, aren't they entitled to see the entire report, legally?

TOOBIN: Well, they're not. I mean, they're not just accepting that. I mean, the House Judiciary Committee has already authorized a subpoena for the full report. So -- but -- but the law was different.

The independent counsel law which Starr was appointed under.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

TOOBIN: The attorney general had absolutely no supervisory role. It was only the court.

HARLOW: Right.

TOOBIN: Whereas Mueller is an employee of the Department of Justice who answers --

HARLOW: To the president.

TOOBIN: -- to the attorney general. And the attorney general had the right to censor this.

CAMEROTA: but isn't there a higher law, if there is such a thing, that says that Congress has ultimate duty of oversight? And doesn't that trump the -- whatever law you're referring to with special versus independent? TOOBIN: The courts will answer that question. But, you know, it is

true that Barr has the right to -- to eliminate classified information from being disclosed to the public. I don't think anybody disagrees with that.

CAMEROTA: But in terms of the grand jury stuff, that was in the Ken Starr report.

TOOBIN: Absolutely. And the continuing investigations is certainly not a -- a legal category. And the fourth category, which to me is the most bizarre of all, the sort of innocent third party rule.

CAMEROTA: The derogatory information.

TOOBIN: Yes. I don't know where he gets the authority with that.

HARLOW: We don't want anyone to feel bad. Back to kindergarten.

TOOBIN: Yes, right.

HARLOW: I would just note that it's on Congress that that independent counsel law lapsed. Like, you know --

TOOBIN: It is. And there was --

HARLOW: -- that's the thing. And they really thought this was the best mechanism.

TOOBIN: And there was bipartisan desire to see that law end. Democrats [SIC] hated the Iran-Contra investigation, which I worked on. The -- I'm sorry. Democrats hated the Starr investigation.

CAMEROTA: Sure. Hate it.

TOOBIN: Republicans hated Iran-Contra.

GOLODRYGA: But this is where things could get very interesting, and watch Democrats specifically here. Because if they do find within this report there are grounds of obstruction or at least pursuing the path of obstruction with regard to the president, you could see them turning to the courts if they want to pursue impeachment. Right?

CAMEROTA: And then everything changes.

GOLODRYGA: So we could see them saying, "Listen, we may be pursuing impeachment of the president, so we need all of that information from the grand jury."

That may be -- and by the way, that would be a challenge for Democrats, too. They -- there's some risk there for them to go down that road.

HARLOW: It's an interesting legal strategy. Berman was talking about it the other week, that if you do file articles of impeachment, it gives you a better case, I guess, to get some of this underlying information. But is that a political risk that they're willing to take?

BRUNI: It's an enormous political -- and there are a lot of political risks here. I mean, tomorrow is the end of nothing. It's the kind of continuation.

And when we're talking about subpoenas, you know, and appeals to courts and all, if this goes all the way to November 2020, it doesn't leave a lot of oxygen for the Democratic candidates to talk about other things.

And we know that what voters want to hear about is not just how much the candidates dislike Trump. They want to hear what you would do for the country.

[07:10:05] HARLOW: That's not true here. When they come on this show and this network, they will be talking about issues. We've got two of them on, coming up today.

BRUNI: Yes, but -- Yes, but I mean, if we're all talking about Mueller, Mueller subpoenas --

HARLOW: I heard you. I hear you.

BRUNI: -- it poses a political risk for Democrat candidates.

TOOBIN: The Republican -- Democratic candidates in 2018 in the midterms were very successful in not talking about Mueller and not talking about these --

HARLOW: Focusing on health care.

TOOBIN: -- and focusing on -- but isn't there every reason to believe the Democrats running for president will do the same thing?

BRUNI: Knock on wood. Hope so.

HARLOW: We don't have any.

CAMEROTA: We'll see in five minutes from now when we have one.

GOLODRYGA: Can I just say, think about all of the times over the past two years, myself included, that we've said on this air, just imagine what Mueller knows. Everything that we know, everything that we've reported, everything that this network, all the news has broken, we've always come down to, but that's just one iota of what Mueller knows. So it's still, regardless of what's going to be redacted tomorrow, will be very interesting.

CAMEROTA: That's such a great point. Tomorrow, we find out.

HARLOW: Yes. Kind of.

BRUNI: Minus -- minus redactions.

CAMEROTA: Tomorrow we find out ish what Mueller knows.

BRUNI: Minus redactions.

CAMEROTA: OK. Speaking of subpoenas, the White House is resistant to handing over information that Congress wants. Forget the Mueller report. On separate issues such as security clearances. They are resisting subpoenas to hand over information. Now what?

TOOBIN: aOn everything. On everything. Recently -- yesterday they said, "We're not providing any information about the president's involvement in the AT&T-Time Warner merger."

HARLOW: Yes.

TOOBIN: The one we all work for.

They are just stiff-arming the Congress on everything. That's why the congressional subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, which happened this week, are so significant. Because the White House can't stop those. Those are -- and I think the subpoenas to the White House, to the government, they're going to be tied up in court, perhaps, for the next two years. But the other subpoenas may produce something.

HARLOW: I'm very interested in that. Because it seems like -- there's one theory that Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan wanted these subpoenas to give them cover for turning over stuff.

TOOBIN: Absolutely.

HARLOW: You know that then it's, like, no choice.

TOOBIN: They had no -- they do have no choice.

GOLODRYGA: Except if the president sues them, which they say is highly unlikely. Other than that, that they will have to turn over -- maybe not today or tomorrow but in the coming weeks.

TOOBIN: I think -- I think the odds are that material will be turned over.

BRUNI: I think you're also going to hear the phrase "executive privilege" quite often in the coming months.

TOOBIN: You've already heard it on the AT&T/Time Warner, yes.

BRUNI: Yes. It's going to become the new witch hunt. Exactly.

CAMEROTA: That's what they're relying on. But how are security clearances executive privilege? I mean, isn't this in the public interest, the national interest to know if somebody is not qualified to have a security clearance?

TOOBIN: This -- you know --

HARLOW: Doesn't Aly just ask, like, the burning question that everyone thinks of?

TOOBIN: She's absolutely right. CAMEROTA: Have I missed my calling?

TOOBIN: We would be happy to have you in the legal profession. It would raise the quality.

CAMEROTA: Of the bar.

HARLOW: Raise the bar.

TOOBIN: But the -- the arguments can be made in court, and once you start making arguments in court, the delay kicks in. And people lose their interest and lose their attention.

If the White House can delay these things until the middle of next year, essentially just one year, which is not that long in legal time, the issues will be successfully dealt with.

GOLODRYGA: And the president has said that. He said, you know, "We're going to wait. It's going to take a long time once it gets mired in the courts. And this will be after 2020, and I'll have won re-election," in his world.

BRUNI: They are trying to run out the clock.

GOLODRYGA: Yes.

HARLOW: Those lawyers just mucking everything up, Toobin.

BRUNI: Alisyn, by the way, I love your high-minded questions about a low-minded administration. You know?

CAMEROTA: Thank you, Frank. Thank you.

HARLOW: All right.

CAMEROTA: Sometimes it is a challenge to ask all of you guys brilliant questions, but I feel that today we accomplished it.

HARLOW: I think you pulled it off.

CAMEROTA: Thank you.

All right. So now to this story. Breaking overnight, dozens of schools are closed in the Denver area while FBI officials look for an armed woman who they say was, quote, "infatuated" with the Columbine massacre.

CNN's Scott McLean is live in Littleton, Colorado.

What is this about, Scott?

SCOTT MCLEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Alisyn.

It's really hard to overstate the significance of shutting down nearly 20 school districts in a metro area the size of Denver. This obviously is affecting hundreds of schools and an exponentially higher number of students.

And it is all because of the threat posed by, at least according to law enforcement, one 18-year-old woman. Her name is Sol Pais, and she is considered armed and dangerous, as well.

She came here on Monday from Florida, according to the FBI. And then she went and immediately purchased a pump-action shotgun and ammunition.

The concerning part for authorities is that, as you said, she has this history of credible but not really specific threats toward schools. She also has this infatuation with the Columbine shooting in 1999 and the shooters who actually carried it out, killing 13 people.

This is hardly the first time that Columbine has been threatened, though it's important to make clear that this is not a threat specific to Columbine, necessarily.

[07:15:08] But the Jefferson County sheriff says that, look, this opens an old wound, especially given that the 20-year anniversary of that day is coming up on Saturday.

Now, authorities think that she was dropped off in the foothills area. That's an area in suburban metro Denver just on the west end of town. But beyond that, they don't know where she might have gone, because she doesn't really have a connection to this city, to this state at all.

Here's the other big question, Alisyn, is what would the FBI actually even charge her with? It's not illegal to buy a gun. Her threats have not been specific. The FBI says that they will try to hold her as long as they legally can -- Poppy.

HARLOW: OK, Scott. We appreciate the reporting. It's a critical story. Let us know what developments you get.

Meantime, in Paris, authorities are launching an investigation into what started that catastrophic fire that ravaged the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral. Take a look at these images. Stunning, stunning before and after images. You can see the pile of rubble right in front of the altar there. The cross and statues near it still standing strong, though.

Our Melissa Bell is live for us in Paris with the very latest.

Melissa, what's the latest both in terms of the investigation and also just the feeling on the ground among Parisians?

MELISSA BELL, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, the latest on the investigation is that Paris prosecutors, as you know, Poppy, who've opened this investigation into what they believe was an accidental fire.

Nonetheless, the question of how this fire was sparked in the attic of Notre Dame remains unanswered this Wednesday morning. I'd just like to show you the facade of Notre Dame this morning. You

can see there the fire trucks parked outside. Firefighters have been working through the night. We know that for a fact, because we've been seeing the lights of their torches flicker throughout the night, through the windows of the iconic building.

And of course, what they are trying to do is establish that the edifice is absolutely secure, despite the vulnerabilities that we heard about yesterday, and also to get to the bottom of that crucial question of how the fire was started, a fire that spread so quickly and so intensely that it caused the damage it did.

Although, of course, here amongst the crowds that continue to file through to come and see for themselves, tourists, ordinary Parisians alike -- there is really a sense of relief that as much of the structure is still standing as you can see here today on the facade there of Notre Dame.

That emotion, those outpourings of emotion continue even as the investigation continues, even as we try to get to the bottom of precisely how that fire was started. And that, Poppy, is going to continue this evening.

This is, of course, Holy Week. Tonight, they're going to be holding a mass that they hold every year during Holy Week. The Chrism mass is normally meant to be held inside Notre Dame. Instead, it will be just a couple of blocks away, with all the more emotion, no doubt, from the Catholics who have gathered to mourn what was lost but also to express their thanks for all that was saved.

Because beyond the exterior, spared as it was by that devastating fire, crucially, so many of the artifacts were saved. So many of those relics crucial to the Catholics, we now know, are in safe hands.

So there is, this Wednesday morning, an awful lot for the Catholic community, for France, and for anyone around the world who cares about Notre Dame -- and there are many of them -- to be thankful for -- Poppy.

HARLOW: Melissa Bell, thank you for bringing us that reporting.

Up next, he is running for president and says he can rebuild the blue wall for Democrats in the Midwest. Congressman Tim Ryan is with us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:22:36] HARLOW: So someone is running for president. Many people are running for president.

CAMEROTA: Actually --

HARLOW: Congressman Tim Ryan is one of them. And his focus is on rebuilding the industrial Midwest. Will that message make him stand out in a crowded field? He is with us in person.

It's nice to have you, Congressman.

REP. TIM RYAN (D-OH), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you.

HARLOW: Thank you for being here.

RYAN: Thank you.

HARLOW: Let's talk about the industrial Midwest. I've spent a lot of time in your district, specifically in Ohio, over the last decade, reporting. I know how upset you are about the GM plant closing there. It's been part of why you're running for president.

But I think the American people really want to know, we want to know what could you as president actually do to change that and similar plant closures? Because GM's plant closed because of market forces, right, not because of who's president.

RYAN: Well, we need an industrial policy in the United States where the president of the United States is actually driving the next generation of jobs.

We're so divided right now that we're starting to lose the long-term economic battle. So the president should be sitting down with the private industry, the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation and say, "OK, how do we win the electric vehicle market, for example?" Where there's one to two million electric vehicles now in the United States or in the world. By 2030, there's going to be 30 million of them. Who's going to make those?

As president, I'm going to say we're going to make those in the United States. We're going to make the batteries in the United States. We're going to make the charging stations in the United States.

But the president of the United States has to drive this agenda with public-private partnerships, incentives for the car companies. Cut these workers in on the deal. That's the next generation of manufacturing. I want that to happen in the United States and make sure the investment goes to distressed communities, communities of color, communities that have been left behind the last 30 or 40 years. This isn't just about GM two weeks ago.

HARLOW: Yes.

RYAN: This is about a 40-year car wreck.

HARLOW: That's dicey when you're talk -- that's dicey when you're talking about capitalism and picking and choosing.

RYAN: Well, not really. I mean, look, you've got to have a coordinated effort. We didn't go to the moon saying, "Oh, I hope the private sector gets us there."

HARLOW: OK.

RYAN: It was -- it was the public sector setting the parameters, making the investments and then relying on the free enterprise system and the ingenuity and the creativity that we have in the United States to help get us there.

We've got to do the same thing in solar. We've got to do the same thing in wind, additive manufacturing. These are areas that are growing 25 to 30 percent a year, and the president is asleep at the switch.

CAMEROTA: I remember after 2016 you were on, and we talked a lot about the economic disorientation of places like Youngstown, Ohio, in your district. What is it that Democrats -- forget the president for a moment -- don't get about the people of Youngstown, Ohio, and what they want to hear?

[07:25:10] RYAN: I think we've become primarily a coastal party. You know, almost two-thirds of our House caucus lives on saltwater. And so the industrial Midwest has been forgotten about by the Democrats in a lot of ways. I want to bring that back.

I don't think we can be a national party if we don't run strong in the Midwest, if we don't rebuild that blue wall, if we don't start winning in the South, if we don't start winning in rural areas.

We've given up on rural America, too. Rural America is in a recession. Farmers haven't made a profit in five years. And they have the exact same problems as we have in Ohio around manufacturing job loss, opiates. It's meth in places like in rural America. Their downtowns are falling apart.

We need a national agenda that's going to plug these communities back in.

HARLOW: So there are some proposals to do that. Like the Green New Deal. That's a national agenda, for example.

Your proposal, though, what you just laid out for us is based on capitalism. Are you at all concerned that more Democrats now, according to Gallup's polling, view socialism favorably than view capitalism favorably? Is that a dangerous line for your party?

RYAN: I'm concerned about it. Because if we are going to decarbonize the American economy, it's not going to be some centralized bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., that's going to make it happen. It's going to be part targeted government investments that do need to be robust.

But it's going to be the free market that's going to, at the end of the day, is going to make that happen. They have the magic of the free market. They have the innovation, the creativity, the profit motive.

I mean, you're not -- the government is not going to completely decarbonize the American economy. We have got to work with them. You can be hostile to concentration of wealth. You can be hostile to income inequality. You know, you can be hostile to greed. We can't be hostile to the free enterprise system. That's how we -- that's how we get past China. CAMEROTA: Of course, it depends on how you define socialism. Right? So the Democrats have one definition of socialism, and the Republicans are trying to turn that and make it a nasty word. You are for Medicare for all. And so of course, the question is, how do you pay for it? What's the answer?

RYAN: Well, either Medicare for all, some kind of public option that we could make sure we get to people. But I think it's one of these deals where the reality of it is you're not going to be paying private insurance anymore. You're going to be paying into a public system.

In many instances now, people can't even get into any system. So we need that public system in place. Some kind of public option for people to go to.

CAMEROTA: And people don't keep private insurance under your plan, or they do?

RYAN: They do. Under -- I would not take anybody's private insurance away. But what --

HARLOW: But that's what the Medicare for All Bill would do.

RYAN: Yes.

HARLOW: And you've cosponsored the one from Congresswoman Jayapal.

RYAN: The Medicare for all issue is really an aspirational, how do we get everybody covered here in the United States?

HARLOW: I hear you, but you've actually put your name behind it.

RYAN: Of course I have.

HARLOW: You cosponsored it, but then you're saying, "I wouldn't do part of what it would do."

RYAN: Well, we're not going to do this tomorrow. This is our aspirational goal. How do we get everybody in the United States covered? I don't back down from that. I think it's important. I think it's a -- it's a human right for everyone in America to have health care. But we don't get there tomorrow.

So how do we start getting people into a public option if they can't get health care anywhere else? And if you like your private insurance, you can keep it. But as we build the system out, it's important to have that public option.

CAMEROTA: The last sitting House member to be elected president was James Garfield in 1880.

RYAN: Where was he from?

CAMEROTA: Good point.

RYAN: He was from Ohio. CAMEROTA: Good point.

RYAN: Come on. History repeats itself.

CAMEROTA: So it's not a worry. It's an asset.

RYAN: That's what I'm talking about here.

HARLOW: Remember, every century -- every few centuries.

CAMEROTA: You just twisted that right around. That is an asset.

The frontrunners right now in Iowa and New Hampshire, I can pull them up for you. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris. What do you have that they don't have?

RYAN: Well, as we said, I can rebuild this blue wall. But also, I think I understand best what our economy has gone through in the last 30 or 40 years. I've lived in this community. My wife has lived in this community. My family has lived in this community.

But because of that, I also understand where we need to go. We've been pushing these newer technologies in places like Youngstown, Ohio, around something like additive manufacturing. I understand where this economy is going because I've been on the ground. And I'm watching the old economy die. And I know where the new economy needs to go, and I know the president is asleep at the switch.

HARLOW: Quickly before we get to something else, something new here for you.

CAMEROTA: Fun lightning round.

HARLOW: Fun lightning round.

RYAN: Thanks a lot.

HARLOW: Quick on this fact. You are a white man.

RYAN: Yes, I am.

HARLOW: Are you committed to a diverse ticket, meaning if you were the candidate, would your vice-presidential pick be a woman or a minority?

RYAN: I'm not sure. I mean, we'll see where it goes by then. I mean, clearly, that's the Democratic Party. That is America. My administration, probably my ticket would represent the diversity of the United States of America.

[07:30:00]