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Senate Panel Releases First Report on January 6th Attack; Obama on Trump's Rise: Mistakenly Thought There Were Guardrails; Obama: 'I Tried' to Tell Story of Race in U.S. as President; Biden's Justice Department to Defend Trump in Lawsuit Over Rape Denial. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired June 08, 2021 - 06:00   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, I'm Brianna Keilar alongside John Berman, in real life.

[05:59:41]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Alongside. Alongside.

KEILAR: Really, truly alongside on this NEW DAY. And just in, the first report of its kind on January 6th reveals new details about the security failures leading to the insurrection, but it completely leaves out Donald Trump's role in what caused the attack.

BERMAN: Plus.

KEILAR: Plus, candid revelations from Barack Obama. What he says about the insurrection, the fate of America's democracy and Republicans who failed to be a guardrail.

BERMAN: Vice President Kamala Harris with a stern warning to migrants: Do not come to the U.S. And the progressives in her party, not happy.

And why is the Biden Justice Department looking to defend Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit from a woman accusing Trump of rape? The surprising move, ahead.

KEILAR: Good morning to our viewers here in the United States and all around the world. It is Tuesday, June 8.

And a bipartisan Senate report on the Capitol insurrection has just been released, and it paints a damning portrait of security lapses on multiple fronts during the January 6th riot and in the days, weeks and months leading up to it.

The report also outlines evidence of stunning intelligence failures, critical miscommunications and unheeded warnings that ultimately led to a chaotic response that day.

BERMAN: The report is also notable for what is not included. There's no examination of Donald Trump's role in the insurrection. In fact, Senate Democrats even avoiding using the word "insurrection" to describe the events of January 6th. Whitney Wild has been poring over the report and is here to join us

with the findings. What did they find, Whitney?

WHITNEY WILD, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CORRESPONDENT: There's a list, a very long list, of security failures and misinterpretations of intelligence and, really, tactical problems that existed much prior to January 6th.

So this report is huge. It's 100 pages. Just to give you a couple of highlights: a lot of this focused on the United States Capitol Police Department for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that's where Congress could get most of the information, because Congress oversees Capitol Police Department.

So a couple things that popped up in the report. Decentralized intelligence that kept United States Capitol Police officials in the dark.

They basically had three intel groups all decentralized, and what ended up happening was the information was not shared. The information flow was significantly hampered, which became a very big problem in the days leading up to January 6.

The -- further, the intel community had a really difficult time deciding what was just free speech, protected by the First Amendment and what actually constituted a threat. That is something, you know, intel communities continue to struggle with. It is one of their biggest questions about how to actually have meaningful security changes while not infringing on the rights of Americans.

And then finally is something we've talked a lot about. The equipment for Capitol Police was just so far below what should have been par. I mean, there were really only a handful of officers who had appropriate riot gear. Some of the officers had riot gear that was stored in a bus. When they went to access it, the bus was locked.

I mean, those are just a couple of the highlights. So again, this report is like 100 pages. There's -- I could go on and on, but I know we want to keep it moving.

KEILAR: Right? OK, well, I don't mean to knock the report, because they did some important work. They talked to 50 officers, I think, and a lot of officials. But at the same time, what's so clear is that it's not sufficient.

WILD: That's right. And so Senator Gary Peters made a point of saying this yesterday in a press briefing of reporters, that -- that this was limited in scope. It is substantive but not a substitute for the work that should have been done and should be done by an independent commission. He really drove that point home.

It's almost impossible to extract the report from the politics surrounding it. The reality is the word "insurrection" does not appear in the report, save for quotes and in footnotes. And that's -- that's by design. So there -- it's pretty clear that there were at least some political negotiations going on here. But what, you know, lawmakers feel very proud about is that they were

able to very quickly put forth this bipartisan effort to try to actually make meaningful change as fast as they could.

So those are the negotiations that went on. In the end, senators insisted, even though I asked and other reporters asked, if there were political pressures that drove the scope, that said we're not going to, you know, discuss the origins of this, that the Trump role. And they insisted political pressure did not limit the scope. However, like I said, it's almost impossible to extract the two.

BERMAN: Well, maybe pressure -- maybe there is objective to the word "pressure." It's clear that politics limited the scope of it. And you know what kind of an investigation could perhaps use the word "insurrection"? A bipartisan commission, for instance. I'm just throwing that out there. For instance.

WILD: Right. I mean, there were -- and there were a lot of limitations here. For example, you know, in the report, it points out that the FBI and DHS has not been altogether forthcoming with the information that was requested. Some staffers who worked on this report said that it was frankly unsatisfactory responses to their inquiries. They have not gotten documents that they requested.

And Roy Blunt points out that they're in the middle of the biggest criminal case for the D.C. area ever, so that would -- may be a logical reason that some of those answers are hampered.

[06:05:05]

However, you know, I think it's pretty alarming that a Senate report is saying, look, these intelligence agencies that were at the forefront of this and that should be providing answers are not doing so in a satisfactory way.

KEILAR: It definitely is. Whitney, thank you so much for that report. And those questions outstanding we are going to hopefully pursue here, because we have a live interview with the person in charge of this report ahead.

BERMAN: All right. In a brand-new CNN interview, former President Barack Obama weighing in on the current political climate, revealing he never thought the, quote, "dark spirits" that began rising within the Republican Party during his time in office would ultimately become the heart of the GOP.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: You write about Sarah Palin, about her brief ascendency, and you talk about dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the Republican Party coming center stage. Did you ever think it would get this dark?

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No. I thought that there were enough guardrails institutionally. That even after Trump was elected, that you would have the so-called Republican establishment who would say, OK, you know, it's a problem if the White House isn't -- doesn't seem to be concerned about Russian meddling. Or it's a problem if we have a president who is saying that neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, they're good people on both sides. You know, that that's a little bit beyond the pale.

And the degree to which we did not see that Republican establishment say, hold on, time out. That's not acceptable, that's not who we are, but rather be cowed into accepting it and then finally culminating in January 6th, where what originally was, Oh, don't worry, this isn't going anywhere, we're just letting Trump and others vent. And then suddenly, you now have large portions of an elected Congress going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election.

COOPER: And the leadership of the GOP briefly for, you know, one night when they still had this sort of --

OBAMA: Yes.

COOPER: -- sense of fear in them, you know, going against the president --

OBAMA: And then poof. Suddenly, everybody was back in line.

Now what that -- the reason for that is because the base believed it. The base believed it, because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch. And nobody stood up and said, Stop. This is enough. This is not true.

I won't say nobody. Let me correct it. There were some very brave people who did their jobs, like the secretary of state in Georgia, who was then viciously attacked for it.

And all those congressmen started looking around and they said, You know what? I'll lose my job. I'll -- I'll get voted out of office.

Another way of saying this is I didn't expect that there would be so few people who would say, Well, I don't mind losing my office, because this is too important. America is too important.

COOPER: Some things are more important than --

OBAMA: Our democracy is too important. We didn't see that.

Now, you know, I'm still the hope and change guy. And so, my hope is -- is that the tides will turn, but that does require each of us to understand that this experiment in democracy is not self-executing. It doesn't happen just automatically. It happens because each successive generation says these values, these truths we hold self-evident. This is important. We're going to invest it in and sacrifice for it; and we'll stand up for it, even when it's not politically convenient.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: What an interesting discussion.

Joining us now April Ryan, CNN political analyst and White House correspondent and D.C. bureau chief for TheGrio, who has been on me from the minute since she walked in the door and saw me in makeup. Also, here today, Brittany Shepherd, White House correspondent for Yahoo! News.

April, notwithstanding everything you said to me over the last 20 minutes, you know, it's very interesting to hear former President Barack Obama speak in depth --

APRIL RYAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right.

BERMAN: -- about what has happened over the last six months and talk about where I think he's surprised and not surprised. He was surprised that more Republicans didn't stand up for what they thought -- -- what was -- what Barack Obama thinks is right at the cost of their own jobs. What did you see there?

[06:10:08]

RYAN: You know, it goes back to who he was when he first ran for president, hope and change. He was hopeful.

But the reality set in that many of these Republicans who voted against the January 6th commission, who voted against impeachment, they were trying to save their lives and their political careers.

To hear him talk, it was the same person we all knew. But many of us didn't get a chance to see that publicly. To hear him talk about how his daughters, his grown daughters, are now marching in the street like many of us, black and white, supporting freedom, supporting rights, he brought it home in a very human way.

But he also talked about it from a very naive way, from someone who was at the highest office in the land, not understanding that things have changed since you were in the Oval Office.

KEILAR: It feels like something -- I sense that from this interview, I also sense that talking to Republicans, who are sort of a different era -- you know, they may just be from five, ten years ago, really, the apex of their careers, but it feels like so -- Romney, it seems like, is kind of confronting what's going on.

But when you talk to some of the former Obama administration officials, when you talk to Republicans who served during that time who might have found some common ground with him, you feel that naivete.

But in retrospect, Obama is saying, Brittany, that you know, he's drawing a line between the forces that he saw kind of churning on the right when he was president and what -- and what we're seeing today.

BRITTANY SHEPHERD, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, YAHOO! NEWS: Well, yes. I mean, Republicanism and far-rightism in the Obama era definitely existed. These online spaces did not pop up out of nowhere, right?

But it's been able to be put under a pressure cooker, be it because of COVID, because of Donald Trump and all the motivating racial forces there. But it's -- we've all seen it. We've seen it explode.

And it's -- I think what's been naive about when you talk -- I've been talking to Republicans -- is that they keep saying that the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the party are a bug. But what Democrats in the White House are telling me is they're actually just a function of where the party is now.

If you look at just Republicans running for Congress, you see that folks like who used to be under Trump, the Ronny Jackson, the Sarah Sanders, they can now be enabled to run for office and may win by pretty large margin.

RYAN: Sarah Sanders is running for office.

SHEPHERD: Right.

RYAN: Yes.

SHEPHERD: And that's what I'm saying. It's just really fascinating that there's this report that came out this morning of tweets and social media behavior that was super totalized normalized: bring your guns to the Capitol, let's kill Mike Pence. And that's not seen as absolutely bat behavior, it's not. It's the way the party is now.

RYAN: And there were 40,000 people with that bat behavior on Capitol Hill. What is it, about 30 -- about 25 to 35,000 made it through the magnetometers, the Secret Service magnetometers, on the Ellipse. And there was a large contingent that did not, because they had backpacks and understood that they couldn't.

Now, this is from my reporting with TheGrio from Secret Service officials. There were 40,000 people on the Hill that believed what Donald Trump was saying. They believed that he was going to walk with them to the Capitol, which he did not.

KEILAR: He told them he was --

RYAN: He told them he was.

KEILAR: -- so they had reason to believe it.

RYAN: Yet another lie that we've found from the president. But think about that. Those 40,000 there and only 500 or so caught, captured, what have you? But think about the scores that are out there who didn't come who wanted to be there in solidarity with their fellow patriots, if you will.

BERMAN: And Brittany, to your point, it's not a bug. It's a feature right now of people running in the Republican Party. "The New York Times" did a great article about how congressional candidates now are basing their candidacies on the lie. This is not some bug. This is the central driving force for many in some parts of the party right now.

Friends, stand by. We have much more to discuss, because the former president also got candid about race and right-wing media, saying outlets are profiting off of fears of white people. KEILAR: Plus, Vice President Kamala Harris tells migrants, do not come

to the U.S. And now progressive Democrats are pushing back.

And why is the Biden Justice Department looking to defend Donald Trump in a lawsuit over the rape accusation against him?

This is NEW DAY.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:18:41]

KEILAR: As the country's first black president, former President Obama was asked if he felt that he told the story of race in America enough. And this was his response.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

OBAMA: Look, I tried. I think I told a lot of stories. You take a look at the speeches I gave in Selma, and the speech I gave during the campaign about Reverend Wright and that whole episode.

And, you know, each and every time I tried to describe why it is that we are still not fully reconciled with our history.

But the fact is that it is a hard thing to hear. It's hard for the majority in this country, white Americans, to recognize that, look, you can be proud of this country and its traditions and its history and our forefathers; and yet, it is also true that this terrible stuff happened. And that, you know, the vestiges of that linger and continue.

[06:20:09]

And the truth is, is that when I tried to tell that story, oftentimes my political opponents would deliberately not only block out that story but try to exploit it for their own political gain.

You know, I tell the story in the book about the situation where Skip Gates, Harvard professor, who's trying to get into his own house, gets arrested, and I'm asked about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry. No. 2, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: Subsequent polling showed that my support among white voters dropped more precipitously after that --

(CROSSTALK) OBAMA: That should have been a minor, trivial incident -- than anything else during my presidency.

COOPER: That's extraordinary.

OBAMA: Well, and it gives a sense of the degree to which these things are still -- you know, they're deep in us. And, you know, sometimes unconscious.

But I also think that there are certain right-wing media venues, for example, that monetize and capitalize on stoking the fear and resentment of a white population that is witnessing a changing America.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: It's so interesting to listen to him talk about his experiences in the White House, talking about race, with now everything that we have experienced here just in the last year or so. Brittany, what did you think about what he said?

SHEPHERD: Well, it made me think when he was speaking that it's not just the message, it's the messenger.

When I was going traveling the country 2020 and talking to white voters, particularly in places like Iowa, you know, Democratic stronghold in many cities, even they were uncomfortable getting really down and dirty talking about race, because all of it has to be self- referential.

And human beings just don't want to confront their own biases. I understand. We all get that way. And especially hearing that from a black man, people get -- voters -- voters get defensive.

And Republicans know that, and they can run off of that. That's why you go into the suburbs and kind of fear monger about Antifa and BLM having guns and coming into your house; and making you feel uncomfortable, because fear is a really powerful motivator.

RYAN: So.

SHEPHERD: So you can kind of empathize why Obama might have been gun- shy talking about race after what looks like an innocuous comment, now. I mean, how many innocuous comments does Biden give every day?

BERMAN: I mean, he can't win. That's -- the Skip Gates incident proves that Barack Obama, in my mind, couldn't win on race. If he can't get upset about Skip Gates and -- you know, how is he supposed to be able to talk about anything else?

RYAN: He was the embodiment, and he still is the embodiment of race. He is -- he was a president who just happened to be black. But his campaign and he -- he knew that if he went out there and talked about race all the time, he would lose out.

When he talked about Skip Gates, he lost a certain segment of white America and never gained it back. And he's keenly aware that he wrote about it in the book, and he talked about it in this great interview with Anderson Cooper.

But he talked about race with Skip Gates. He talked about race, as he said in the interview, with Jeremiah Wright. But he also talked race when he went to Selma, you know, with then-Congressman John Lewis, commemorating 50 years since that bloody Sunday march.

He talked race when we went to Africa and traveled through Africa. He talked race with Trayvon Martin, and it -- it boggled my mind, Brianna and John and Brittany, when -- when he said, he could have been my son. I'm like, and all the reporters are like, What did he mean? What do you think he meant? He was a black man in America who was susceptible to all the things that other black men were susceptible to. If he did not have Secret Service around him and if he had a baseball cap on. even though he had that bop, he was still susceptible.

BERMAN: You know, it's interesting. I think it boggles Barack Obama's mind that he still gets asked if he did enough about race. You could see in his -- in the way he answered the question from Anderson.

I do want to bring up another subject, because it was big news overnight that I think was surprising to a lot of people, Brittany, which is that the Justice Department, the Merrick Garland-led Justice Department, is siding with former President Donald Trump on the issue of the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, the writer who said that Donald Trump raped her decades ago.

E. Jean Carroll sued Trump for defamation for his response to this lawsuit. And then the Bill Barr Justice Department said, you know, you can't sue a president for defamation for something like this, because he was acting in his role as president.

[06:25:00]

So the suit carries over now. And then Merrick Garland is taking the side, basically, of the Barr Justice Department, saying, We don't think that Trump can be sued here. This is surprising, I think, to a lot of progressives. And Biden even sort of mentioned this during the campaign.

SHEPHERD: Well, yes. I mean, when you look at the note that Merrick Garland's team put out, he said, Well, we don't agree with anything that Trump said. He was cruel. His actions we don't condone. But he was acting as president. And it is interesting to see him and the department fall in line with what the Trump administration was saying.

But honestly, when you talk to Biden advisers, I'm not as shocked, because they -- the last thing they want is Trump up on Capitol Hill taking up all of the air space, even if they do believe that he has to answer for his crimes. Because then every question in the briefing is about Trump. Every -- the midterm messaging then just becomes about Trump. And it becomes a distraction even more than all the other things that we have to deal with right now. Talk about infrastructure, talk about guns, talk about voting rights. I mean, you guys all know all the legislative hobnobbery that needs to happen.

So it -- aides are quietly, you know, pleased with how this is going, but it still is shocking to see Trump and Biden on the same team here.

KEILAR: Because objectively, it is good that an administration is striving to put norms back in the Justice Department, right? I mean, objectively, that is good.

RYAN: Normal. He was not normal.

KEILAR: I'm talking about this administration. But -- but I mean, progressives must look at this and go, What the heck, really? You're going to defend this one?

RYAN: Exactly. And you're talking about bringing norms back, but again, Donald Trump was not normal. He's not a normal person, and he was not a normal president. He was extreme in every way. But one of the reasons --

KEILAR: Is this misguided, then, in your -- in your estimation of trying to reestablish norms, but maybe this isn't the hill to die on?

RYAN: So let me -- let me explain it this way. Covering Donald Trump for those four years, he pushed hard from day one, that re-election bid. From day one when he walked in the Oval Office, he wanted to be re-elected. One of the main reasons was because he did not want to face court actions against him.

He is now -- he's civilian. He doesn't have the immunity anymore. And knowing what I know about the fact, again, that he did not want to face this, and he wanted another term, that's saying a lot.

BERMAN: Yes. Look, this is unique. And, A, the Biden White House, we are told, did not know about this decision from the Merrick Garland Justice Department. I think that's important to note.

And the second thing here, this deals with the former president, Donald Trump, in his role as president --

RYAN: Right.

BERMAN: -- which again -- so says the Justice Department, which is different than some of the other things he faces. But I take all your points here.

It's great to see you in person here.

RYAN: I'm glad you're in D.C. Come back, John. Yes.

BERMAN: Did it meet your expectations?

RYAN: You have met the bar. You have exceeded --

SHEPHERD: Exceeded, yes.

RYAN: -- the bar, exceedingly and abundantly. BERMAN: The admittedly low bar, based on what we were talking about.

KEILAR: No.

BERMAN: It's very nice to see you in person, April.

KEILAR: So we still have a lot more ahead from our CNN interview with Barack Obama: what he said about the role that right-wing media companies have in dividing Americans.

BERMAN: Plus, Vice President Kamala Harris issues a stern warning to migrants: Do not come to the United States.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)