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The Lead with Jake Tapper
Trump Attacks Democrats for Focusing on Bullshit; Combative Trump Attacks Schiff, Calls Impeachment Inquiry a Hoax; Putin Defends Trump over Impeachment Inquiry, Says Nothing Wrong with Trump-Ukraine Call; The New York Times Op-Ed Says There May Be a Third Coverup by The DOJ and Trump. Aired 3:30-4p ET
Aired October 02, 2019 - 15:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Welcome back with breaking news and a special edition of THE LEAD: THE WHITE HOUSE IN CRISIS. A parental advisory for you, in this block I'm going to be quoting from things that the President of the United States has tweeted. So if you have kids in the room, you might want to mute the television because he used some profanity today.
The combative President Trump, increasingly combative, lashing out, claiming he always cooperates -- which is not true -- as House Democrats prepare to subpoena the White House for the Ukraine scandal. The President also attacking the impeachment inquiry as a hoax, a coup and even saying Democrats are focusing on quote, bullshit.
Let's talk about all of this with my panel. And Bill, let me start with you, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, he called for the Secretary of State Pompeo to recuse himself.
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That Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff says he is deeply concerned about Pompeo potentially interfering with witnesses. Do they have a point?
BILL KRISTOL, CONSERVATIVE WRITER: I think they do just based on Pompeo's public statements let alone whatever the State Department Inspector General might be saying today. I think one thing that's striking, we were talking about this before. The President's gone on tirades many, many times and ordered that things be done that weren't done. But they weren't done by Rex Tillerson when he was at the State Department and H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis were there to back up Tillerson. They weren't done by Jeff Sessions famously at the Justice Department.
But I think is really genuinely worrisome and I would even say scary now, is two of the most powerful departments in the U.S. government, the State Department and Justice Department are being run by intelligent people, who know how to run those departments, and they're being put entirely in my view at the President's personal disposal for his personal political agenda.
I've talked to professionals from the intelligence world and actually from justice as well in the past. The idea that the Attorney General is going around the world talking to foreign governments getting the President to call, the Attorney General can meet with any of his counterparts anytime he wants. They could be set up
routinely obviously through embassies and so forth. They having the President call these other countries to say we want you to cooperate when the Attorney General, shows up and looks into the roots of the 2016 investigation.
TAPPER: Looking to undermine Mueller.
KRISTOL: Looking to undermine Mueller. Looking to undermine the notion that Russia was behind the leaks. Who knows what else the Presidents is saying on those phone calls. And then obviously with Pompeo at state, a kind belligerence towards Congress, refusal.
Again, we have the whistleblower's report, we have the transcript. The obvious thing you need to do is hear from the other people who are in the room in these meetings. And the person who is in charge of Ukraine and other relevant officials at the State Department, and Pompeo is saying, no.
TAPPER: And Laura, let me ask you, as a legal matter. Adam Schiff, who was a former prosecutor brought up the fact -- and this probably meant more to you than it did to lay people such as myself. But he brought up the idea that if people don't cooperate, if the State Department doesn't comply with subpoenas, Rudy Giuliani, the White House, whoever, that will be taken in some manner as evidence that they are trying to cover something up.
LAURA COATES, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes. I mean it would be taken as, there's some reason you don't want to be forthcoming. And I can essentially assume that the reason is something nefarious or sinister or that you are complicit in that. And that's not too far off of what happens outside a Congressional impeachment investigation world. If you fail to in a civil matter litigiously, if you fail to comply with a court order or hand over discovery, I can make a negative assumption based on what you've done as the court, I can assume that you actually don't have an intent to do the right thing. And so he's following that a little bit.
But for me what concerns me greater is the notion of esteem here, Jake, of the shoot the messenger. You see it when it's coming to Barr, you see it for Pompeo, and you see it for Donald Trump. How? Because if the idea here is to look at Adam Schiff and his commentary as opposed to the underlying substance of the whistleblower's complaint, if the idea if you're Barr go around try to figure out about how the inception of the Mueller report or looking at the probe rather than underlying claims that are made.
If you are any other official or Pompeo telling his officials, listen, I've already been subpoenaed. If you were to say, hand over documents, you might be violating federal law because it belongs to me. This idea of shooting the vehicle of which we actually get information, that's the theme we're hearing. All of that is defined really as an abuse of power.
DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: And everything that you just said if that happened before last week when the House Speaker said this is an impeachment inquiry, would just be run of the mill stonewalling. This is different. This is stonewalling that can be used and will be used as a bit of evidence in articles of impeachment on obstruction.
COATES: Yes.
TAPPER: All right. Everyone stick around, we have more to talk about. President Trump has Congressional Republicans and now Vladimir Putin with having his back when it comes to the impeachment inquiry. What am I talking about? Stay with us.
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TAPPER: And we're back with this special edition of THE LEAD: WHITE HOUSE IN CRISIS as President Trump faces this impeachment inquiry.
It's not just Republican allies who are defending him, it's extending all the way to Russia. That's where we find CNN's Fred Pleitgen in Moscow, and Fred, Vladimir Putin came to President Trump's defense as well?
FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, well, he certainly he didn't just come to President Trumps' defense, at times it just sort of sounded like he was working off President Trump's own talking points. He ripped into the impeachment inquiry and he also said that he believes that President Trump in some ways is the victim in all this. Here what he had to say.
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VLADIMIR PUTTING, PRESIDENT, RUSSIA (through translator): They began with this impeachment proceeding and they always recall Nixon. Nixon's team was wiretapping, listening to their rivals. But this is a completely different situation. Trump was wiretapped. Some anonymous special service staffer leaked this information and based on what we know from the call, there was nothing wrong there.
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PLEITGEN: Two more things that are really interesting about all this, Jake. On the one hand, he also said that if for instance the White House wanted to release the transcripts of the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki last year, he says he'd be perfectly fine with this. And he said that the Kremlin actually told the White House to just release those if they wanted to. Vladimir Putin then also trolling the United States when asked about election meddling in the 2020 election. He said, jokingly, yes, of course, I will do it. But don't tell anyone. Obviously, a joke to him, not a joke to many people in the United States -- Jake. TAPPER: And of course, what he said about President Trump being
wiretapped by the whistleblower is a complete lie. Fred Pleitgen in Moscow. Thank you so much.
Is there a third cover-up involving this whistleblower complaint against President Trump? What that should be getting more attention? We'll have this new allegation next. Stay with us.
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TAPPER: Welcome back to this special edition of THE LEAD: THE WHITE HOUSE IN CRISIS. New allegations today of a third possible cover-up involving the whistleblower who sounded the alarm about President Trump's push to have Ukraine's President investigate his political rival Joe Biden.
In a "New York Times" opinion piece today, a former Obama administration official, and one who worked for both Obama and Trump, argued that while we all know about the first alleged coverup -- that's the White House removing that call transcript to a secure system reserved for national security secrets.
And we all know about the second alleged cover-up that the administration tried to prevent Congress from seeing the transcript to begin with. What we aren't talking about is, an alleged third cover- up. The Justice Department not referring the matter to the Federal Election Commission as a campaign finance violation.
Joining me now is Josh Geltzer. He's a co-author of the "New York Times" piece and a former adviser on national security matters to President Obama and briefly to President Trump. Josh, thanks so much for joining us. What do you mean this is a third coverup?
JOSH GELTZER, CO-WROTE OP-ED ABOUT POSSIBLE THIRD WHISTLEBLOWER COVERUP: So the Justice Department has had for four decades an agreement with the Federal Election Commission to refer potential election law violations to the Commission. Because the Commission has a host of tools that aren't just the criminal prosecution tool that justice has and the standards can be much lower. You don't need to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. You don't have to a certain monetary threshold. And yet that referral never happened here at least so far as we know.
TAPPER: And you along with Neal Katyal, the former acting Solicitor General in the Obama administration write in this op-ed, quote, in its handling of the investigation and a potential campaign-finance violation, the Department of Justice appears to have ignored a rule that a matter under investigation must be referred to the Federal Election Commission. Critically, if the department had followed the rule, the Ukraine affair would have been disclosed to the American public.
How would it be disclosed to the American public?
GELTZER: That's right. It would have come out at some point. Perhaps not immediately if the FEC continued to investigate it. But if there had been an enforcement action, the imposition of a monetary fine for example. If there had been an opinion issued that this in fact violated the law as many experts think it did. In some form, it would have allowed the FEC to take this and put it into the arena of public opinion as part of doing its job to enforce election law.
TAPPER: So the matter was looked at by the Justice Department. And they say it was deemed not to be a criminal violation? Why is that not sufficient?
GELTZER: Well, there are indications as to why is they couldn't quantify the type of help from a foreign national that President Trump appeared to be soliciting in that Ukraine phone call.
TAPPER: So in other words, having Ukraine investigate Joe and Hunter Biden, they don't know how much that's worth?
GELTZER: What is that worth to you? How do you put a dollar sign in front of that? That seems to be why at least a key reason that the Justice Department didn't pursue not only criminal prosecution but even short of that, just further criminal investigation. And we could quibble with that but none of that appears to an excuse for not referring it to the FEC which has different standards, different tools. And regardless, a document that's in the federal register saying, we are entitled to take a look at this too because we share responsibility for upholding federal election law.
TAPPER: Is there a deficiency in the law in the sense that who knows how much that's worth? I mean I think that the Mueller report even goes into this when it comes to the Trump Tower meeting and says it's unclear how much dirt on Hillary Clinton would even be worth in terms of a criminal offense?
GELTZER: It is something that the Mueller report spends time grappling with and ultimately among the many reforms that I'd to think come out of this is clarity in the law here. Because the idea that the phrase "thing of value" should mean something you could put a particular dollar sign and then a number in front of, I don't think that is what we want our election law enforcement to stand on. Information, it has value and if you can't put a dollar sign on, it still shouldn't be something you get out and get a foreign national to give you to influence our elections here at home.
TAPPER: And certainly a lot of people spend a lot of money in this country hiring people to dig up dirt on their political opponents and other kinds of opponents.
GELTZER: If one had to quantify it, one might look to how much one spends on that sort of research.
TAPPER: Josh Geltzer, thank you so much for your time, really appreciate it. Thanks for coming in. Breaking news on this special edition of THE LEAD: THE WHITE HOUSE IN
CRISIS. The State Department Inspector General is holding a briefing on Capitol Hill right now, what we're learning about the closed-door briefing, that's next.
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ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.
TAPPER: Welcome to a special edition of THE LEAD: THE WHITE HOUSE IN CRISIS. I'm Jake Tapper in Washington. We begin again today with breaking news in the politics lead. President Trump lashing out moments ago during a White House news conference calling the impeachment inquiry, a quote, a fraudulent crime on the American people and slamming the whistleblower as dishonest and vicious.
We should note that the facts of the whistleblower complaint align with the rough transcript the White House released of the phone call according to the Director of National Intelligence himself.
Mr. Trump also going after the House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff claiming without evidence that Schiff was involved in writing or helping to write the whistleblower complaint. We should point out, I reached out to the attorney for the whistleblower, Mark Zaid, who says, that is absolutely not true. The whistleblower complaint centered on a call, in which President Trump asked the President of Ukraine to investigate his own domestic political rivals, the Bidens.
