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The Lead with Jake Tapper
Bernie Sanders Now Democratic Front-Runner; Trump Thanks DOJ For Intervening in Roger Stone Case. Aired 4-4:30p ET
Aired February 12, 2020 - 16:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[16:00:01]
JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: THE LEAD starts right now.
Unchecked, punishing witnesses and now helping felon friends. How are Republican senators feeling after just one week of post-impeachment Trump?
Pressure campaign 2.0. Democrats now calling for another investigation, after President Trump pats his attorney general on the back for intervening in that criminal case against Trump pal Roger Stone.
Plus: momentum swing. The 2020 race moves on to Nevada and South Carolina, with Bernie Sanders leading in votes and in polls and in money. But can Sanders convince a critical group of Democratic voters who have yet to really have their say?
ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.
TAPPER: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.
We begin with breaking news.
It has been exactly one week to the day since the Senate acquitted President Trump, with Republican senators expressing confidence at the time that they believed President Trump had learned his lesson. What lesson exactly?
Well, President Trump was just asked that very question. Here's his response to the question, have you learned your lesson? What lesson is it?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: That the Democrats are crooked, they have got a lot of crooked things going, that they're vicious that they shouldn't have brought impeachment.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: So that's President Trump's take on the lesson he learned.
Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown says there is another lesson that President Trump has clearly learned.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. SHERROD BROWN (D-OH): It's pretty clear the president of the United States did learn a lesson, the lesson he can do whatever he wants -- whatever he wants. He can abuse his office. He will never, ever be held accountable by this Senate.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: Sherrod Brown, the senator from Ohio, saying that in the wake of President Trump now publicly calling for federal prosecutors to take it easy on his friends and go after his enemies.
President Trump just today thanked the Justice Department and congratulated Attorney General Bill Barr for intervening in the case against his longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone.
Stone, you may recall, was found guilty by a jury in November of seven counts, including lying to and obstructing Congress. President Trump, in the last day, has personally attacked the prosecutors and the judge in the case. Those prosecutors were seeking seven to nine years in prison for Roger Stone.
But after the president took to Twitter to attack that recommendation, senior Justice Department officials, including, according to President Trump, the attorney general, Bill Barr, well, they undercut their own prosecutors. They recommended that Stone be sentenced to far less than was what first proposed in a letter that legal experts said read more like a letter from defense attorneys than from the Justice Department.
In a stunning response to all this, all four of the prosecutors have now resigned from the case.
Now, a few Republicans, such as senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have said -- quote -- "This just doesn't look right."
But far more Republicans are downplaying it all, including Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the body theoretically tasked with the oversight of the Justice Department.
Graham told reporters today, essentially, there's nothing to see here.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): Should the president stay out of cases? Yes, absolutely. He should not be commenting on cases in the system. I have said that a bunch.
And if I thought he'd done something, had it changed the outcome inappropriately, I'd be the first to say.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: Graham is hardly alone among his Republican colleagues. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Is it possible that he is getting favored -- favored treatment here because he's the president's friend?
SEN. RICK SCOTT (R-FL): I don't know. I don't know. I don't know enough about the facts, but I do believe everybody ought to be treated the same.
RAJU: Should Barr come and testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee?
SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX): About what?
RAJU: About this?
CORNYN: That is up to the chairman.
(CROSSTALK)
QUESTION: Should the president be tweeting about a sentence regarding someone he's close with him?
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): I have suggested to the White House and to the president that tweeting less would not cause brain damage.
But the president is going to tweet.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: Graham was also asked today if he saw this all as part of a pattern of President Trump politicizing what is supposed to be an independent Department of Justice. Graham said, no, he's comfortable, the system is working.
Is it?
Doesn't seem to be for Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman. Vindman complied with a House subpoena, told the truth, as he saw it, and last week was fired from his National Security Council job, even being ignominiously escorted from the White House grounds.
And now President Trump is sending the signal that the Pentagon should look into disciplining Vindman.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: That's going to be up to the military. We will have to see.
But if you look at what happened, I mean, they're going to certainly, I would imagine, take a look at that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: So, when Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says the system is working, the question is, working for whom?
[16:05:02]
CNN's Kaitlan Collins has more now from the White House, where President Trump just spoke.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In the week since he was acquitted, President Trump has embarked on a payback campaign that has targeted witnesses and caused upheaval at the Justice Department.
TRUMP: They treated Roger Stone very badly.
K. COLLINS: White House officials insist Trump didn't ask the Justice Department to reduce Roger Stone's recommended prison sentence, though he publicly thanked them today.
The president criticized the four prosecutors who, citing federal sentencing guidelines, said Stone should serve seven to nine years in prison, before later being overruled by senior officials.
TRUMP: They ought to go back to school and learn, because I will tell you, with the way they treated people, nobody should be treated like that.
K. COLLINS: As Trump has continued to dangle a pardon for Stone...
TRUMP: I don't want to say that yet.
K. COLLINS: ... the White House also abruptly pulled the nomination for a top Treasury job for the former U.S. attorney who headed the office that prosecuted Stone.
CNN has now learned it was Trump who made the ultimate decision to pull Jessie Liu's nomination two days before her scheduled confirmation hearing, and that decision was directly tied to her former job.
Trump hasn't stopped there. After impeachment witness Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman was fired and escorted off White House grounds last week, the president is now suggesting he should face disciplinary action.
TRUMP: That's going to be up to the military. We will have to see. But if you look at what happened, I mean, they're going to certainly, I would imagine, take a look at that.
K. COLLINS: The Army says there's no investigation into Vindman.
Vindman is not likely the last career official to leave the National Security Council. Dozens more are expected to be transferred out in the coming days, in what the national security adviser is describing as a housecleaning.
ROBERT O'BRIEN, U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I think we're down to around 115 to 120 staffers, or will be by the end of this week.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
K. COLLINS: Now, Jake, the president is not only taking issue with that recommended prison sentence for Roger Stone. He's also taking issue with the fact that he was convicted at all, saying that no one can define what he did.
Well, Jake, he was convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness. And it only took a jury about two days, less than two days, actually, to deliberate and find him guilty on all seven charges.
TAPPER: Yes, nobody even knows what he did? A jury knows what he did.
K. COLLINS: Yes.
TAPPER: Seven very clear counts that they found him guilty of.
Kaitlan Collins, thanks so much.
Let's talk about this with our experts here.
Elliot, let me start with you.
Senator Graham said that the president should absolutely stay out of these ongoing cases. I guess the Justice Department is saying that they made the decision to undermine their own prosecutors independent of President Trump. What do you think?
ELLIOT WILLIAMS, FORMER DEPUTY U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well, yes, the president should.
Remember, I think what the president has confused from his first days as president is that, despite being the head of the executive branch, he ought to stay out of criminal investigations.
So, by way of example, when I was there, we would -- at the Justice Department -- we would deal with the White House all the time about all kinds of matters, but not criminal investigations. The president has no business weighing in on someone's sentence or whether someone should be charged and so on.
But the problem is that you have a president who seems to believe that the Justice Department acts to his benefit and not the federal government's, that everything is in service of him. And so, yes, he ought -- what we should have is Lindsey Graham call the president -- not the president to testify, but people to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee to talk about how wrong all of this conduct was.
TAPPER: And, Dana, after impeachment, Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she hoped the president would learn his lesson. She was one of many people who -- many Republican senators who said that.
Collins later amended to say that that was aspirational. She hoped the president would learn his lesson. Manu Raju asked her about that today. Take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RAJU: In light of the president's actions, do you think there's any lessons that he learned from being impeached?
SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): I don't know which actions you're referring to.
I have made very clear that I don't think anyone should be retaliated against. That has nothing to do with the basis by which I voted to acquit the president.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: I mean, the president is putting people like her, who voted to acquit President Trump -- and she's in a tough reelection race -- in a very difficult position.
DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: He sure is. And he doesn't really seem to care, does he? Because he is the one at the top of the ticket.
And he -- just history shows that he has reason to believe that he's -- no matter what he does, he could help them. And the reason I say that is because of what happened in 2016. Just by way of example, Ron Johnson, everybody thought he was going to lose and Wisconsin.
And then, surprise, Donald Trump won in Wisconsin, and really helped bring Johnson over the finish line. And so that is the mentality.
OK. If the president is even giving it a thought as to how his actions affect the prospects of keeping the Senate, that is almost surely where his mind-set is.
TAPPER: And, Sara, today, President Trump praised the Justice Department. He tweeted -- quote -- "Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and brand should not have even been brought."
[16:10:03]
I mean, he has always said -- he said during -- when Jeff Sessions was attorney general, like, he needs -- where's my Roy Cohn? How come I don't have an attorney general like John F. Kennedy had Bobby Kennedy?
Does he have what he wants in Bill Barr?
SARA MURRAY, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I mean, I think he certainly does in this situation.
It's really hard to look at what has happened over the last 24 hours as anything other than political interference on behalf of the attorney general to help out one of the president's friends, his longtime political adviser Roger Stone, in a way that, the more we look at, looks extremely ham-handed and also extremely unnecessary.
If you're the president of the United States, you really feel this is unfair, you're really worried Roger Stone is going to get nine years in jail, you can pardon him. And it's very clear from the president's comments that he's walking all the way up to the line, just short of saying, I plan to pardon Roger Stone.
So that makes all of this even more perplexing as to why the Justice Department wanted to insert itself in such a public way in this fray.
TAPPER: Yes.
MURRAY: And whatever the logic was there, you walk away with the view that Bill Barr was kind of -- it looks like a show of loyalty.
TAPPER: What lesson did President Trump learn from impeachment, assuming that he learned one?
You heard Sherrod Brown earlier say he learned what? He learned he can get away with anything, and Republicans in the Senate aren't going to do anything. You heard President Trump say the lesson he learned is that Democrats are crooked and impeachment was a mistake.
Did he learn something? Obviously, I'm sure you don't think he learned what Susan Collins hoped he would learn. Did he learn something, and what was it?
CARRIE CORDERO, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: He learned that he can act with impunity when it comes to the political pressure that he wants to place on the institutions. That's what he learned.
The Senate did not hold him accountable. And only one Republican member of the Senate, Mitt Romney, voted in favor of the article that he had abused his power.
So what he took from that is that he now has the rest of this term, at least, to be able to act in a way that he is unaccountable. And we are seeing just in the past week, in particular with the change of this sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, his friend, his campaign adviser, that he can press on the Department of Justice.
He just appointed a new general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, which is another place where now he has an acting legal counsel that the White House can put political pressure on. And so he has learned that he is the boss, and there is now not another branch of government, at least in the legislative branch, that is going to check him when it comes to what he wants to do.
BASH: And can I just add, you asked me about the impact it will or will not have on senators.
The check on him is what happens in November, theoretically, right? Because he is acting as if he won reelection already. He's acting as if the shackles are off, and he's a second-term president, and he can kind of do what he wants, but he's not. And so he is -- he's riding away have a really good week last week. And it's very clear that that is a big part of the actions that he is taking. And it is an unknown.
Despite the fact that we have seen voters who support him stick with him, it is an unknown whether or not that is the case with regard to being able to win enough electoral votes to be president again.
TAPPER: Yes.
And, Elliot, the precedent being set here, I wonder if you think about that at all, because, I mean, if a -- I mean, I remember when Republicans and the media, to an extent, were exercised when Bill Clinton met with Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, on a tarmac.
There was no evidence that he talked about the investigation into his wife, Hillary Clinton, but it sure -- it looked bad. But here we have, it's all out in the open. I mean, the president saying, I don't want my buddy to be punished this way. Fix it.
WILLIAMS: We talked about this on this very program, you and I, a bunch of times.
Look, the bar is now -- bar -- pun intended -- but the bar is set very low now for a president's conduct. And there's pretty much anything a president can get away with.
I just don't think folks who don't live in sort of the Justice Department world really understand how bad this conduct is over the last week. And this is over a few years of problems with the president and the president behavior.
This is DEFCON 1-level problem.
CORDERO: Well, the actions of those prosecutors is what speaks to that.
(CROSSTALK)
TAPPER: The resignations.
CORDERO: That's how outsiders can look at what happened yesterday and know that this is something different.
TAPPER: All right, everyone, stick around.
New outrage and now new calls from Democrats for an investigation into President Trump and the Justice Department and the handling of the Roger Stone case. But will any of that make a difference?
Plus, after a win in New Hampshire, Senator Bernie Sanders is the current Democratic front-runner, but other candidates are making moves of their own ahead of more contest on the calendar.
Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[16:18:52]
TAPPER: We have some breaking news for you.
Attorney General Bill Barr has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee next month, his first appearance since coming on the job. This all comes as outraged Democrats are calling for an investigation into Barr's apparent intervention of the sentencing of Trump pal Roger Stone.
But as CNN's Alex Marquardt reports for us now, Republican lawmakers seem to be looking the other way.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ALEXANDER MARQUARDT, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Among the president's staunch defenders, this is a case of overreach, not by the president, though, but by the federal prosecutors handling his friend Roger Stone's case.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): I've got real concerns about overzealous prosecution more than anything else.
MARQUARDT: The Justice Department's overruling of the prosecution's recommended seven to nine-year sentence for Roger Stone after the president called it a miscarriage of justice left Republican lawmakers only criticizing his active Twitter habit.
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): The president is going to tweet. I don't think it had anything to do with this.
MARQUARDT: Meanwhile Democrats are outraged, accusing Attorney General Bill Barr of destroying the independence of the Justice Department to do the president's bidding by intervening to try to get the sentence reduced for Roger Stone, Trump's longtime adviser and friend.
[16:20:07]
A thought given fuel by the president's congratulatory tweet to Barr today for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): What is more swampy, what is more fetid, what is more stinking than the most powerful person in the country literally changing the laws to help a crony guilty of breaking the law.
MARQUARDT: Democrats' calls reignited for Barr to step down and his actions investigated.
SEN. MARK WARNER (D-VA): What I think we're seeing is an unprecedented assault upon the independence of our Justice Department.
MARQUARDT: After the Justice Department revived the sentencing recommendation made by four career prosecutors in Stone's case, all four of them withdrew in quick succession. A mass protest by a legal team that included two prosecutors from Robert Mueller's investigation, which led to Stone being convicted on seven charges last year.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: These are, I guess, the same Mueller people that put everybody through hell. And I think it's a disgrace.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MARQUARDT: And we just learned today that Roger Stone made a request for a new trial and was denied by the judge. He argued one of his jurors was biased. That same judge, Amy Berman Jackson, will have the final say in what sentence Roger Stone finally gets.
Jake, we'll see if she listens to the Justice Department. That sentencing set for February 20th, which is next Thursday -- Jake.
TAPPER: All right. Alex Marquardt, thanks so much.
Paul Begala, let's start with you, just because I'm trying to imagine Bill Clinton doing this, any of this. If you had known you could get away with this --
PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It is still wrong. This is how far we've come. If I wanted Attorney General Janet Reno in those days to come to a press conference, I didn't call the Justice Department, I went to the White House counsel's office. I said, Chuck Ruff, will you please call the attorney general and have her at 10:00 a.m. for a press conference with the president. That's how --if I had a secretary, I called him. But we were so careful. Every president, the Bush administration --
TAPPER: Not everybody all the time but you, I'm saying, were careful.
BEGALA: We had ironclad rules.
TAPPER: Right.
BEGALA: That you cannot contact -- that wasn't --
TAPPER: Well, he says he didn't call, he just tweeted.
BEGALA: He's corrupted them and politicized them in a way that sadly is going to take a long time to recover. I think people's faith in the Justice Department is really going to be shaken.
TAPPER: Mary Katharine, since President Trump was acquitted a week ago, one week ago, just to be clear, one week ago, he removed Lieutenant Colonel Vindman and his twin brother from NSC, he removed, he fired Ambassador Gordon Sondland. He attacked senators who voted to convict him, including Mitt Romney, attacked the faith of Romney and Nancy Pelosi, he attacked the judge in the Roger Stone case, attacked the sentencing proposal, the prosecutors in the Roger Stone case, withdrew the nomination of Jesse Liu who oversaw Stone's prosecution, she was up for a Treasury Department job. What do you think?
MARY KATHARINE HAM, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Has he learned lessons? I don't think he learns lessons some would hope he would learn. It's just not in the cards. And here we are.
On the other hand, it was arguably one of the best weeks of his presidency.
TAPPER: Last week, sure.
HAM: Yes, and that is what Democrats must contend with is that the unique nature of this candidate to take all of that on and for his approval not to really full off, perhaps even to increase for the economic numbers to be this good and for people to say 59, 60 percent doing better than they were a year ago, that was a juggernaut you have to contend with. Because this stuff doesn't actually work against him partly because every day, it's a new outrage and a new investigation from Democrats, and people must be forgiven for having limited bandwidth for the --
TAPPER: It does work against him to the degree he has this incredible economy and disapproval over 50 percent.
HAM: Yes, but he's -- he floats right along, you know?
TAPPER: Yes.
KAREN FINNEY, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: But I was just -- we're at a moment where Democrats needs to, I agree with you, seize this and make this election about morals and values and why it matters because while the president is doing this, he's not doing infrastructure. We've been waiting for that for three or four years. He's actually not, you know, making the cost of prescription drugs lower. He's not actually making your health care costs lower. I mean, you have to -- the problem I think we have is we have to tie it into very real consequences for the American people.
TAPPER: What do you think, Scott?
SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think a lot of people not in Washington look at Donald Trump and say, oh, the people in Washington are mad about something he did, good.
TAPPER: Yes.
JENNINGS: And that is the fundamental truth of his coalition and it is the fundamental truth of how a lot of people view Washington these days. When there's outrage by the bureaucrats and politicians and the media, then somebody is doing something right, because that's what I voted against in 2016.
It doesn't make all the tweets right, all the decisions right, doesn't make the president infallible, but it is a fundamental political fact.
[16:25:04] And to your point, I think that's exactly why he is floating along because the outrage machine drives that attitude.
BEGALA: But it's why Karen and Mary Katharine are right that the Democrats have to make it about the voters, not Trump, not about Roger Stone who is a convicted felon. You have to make it about voters.
The most important thing, the election about 230 days away. The most important thing that happened this week is that Donald Trump released a budget that cuts Medicare, cuts Medicaid, last year it cuts Social Security. Every Democrat every day should set their watch, five minutes, every five minutes and say, oh, by the way, Donald Trump wants to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.
Because see, that's about the voters' lives, not about Roger Stone will go to prison or not.
HAM: Will they do that or they just talk about Roger Stone?
BEGALA: They have to listen to me. They do everything I say.
TAPPER: Let me say it quickly. Is he making it tougher for people like Susan Collins and Martha McSally and Cory Gardner who are running for reelection?
JENNINGS: Sure. I mean, I mean --
TAPPER: OK.
JENNINGS: Because they would rather talk about kitchen table issues you just rattled off. But to the extent you're answering questions about that, you're not ruling I mean, like this -- some of the senators are working on a prescription drug bill, something on a surprise medical bill and other issues.
But if you're answering questions in the hallway about Roger Stone, you're not talking about legislation.
HAM: Those people cannot win without a consolidated and enthused Trump base. They can afford to lose the other side.
TAPPER: That's the conundrum, the conundrum of it all.
Everyone, stick around. We've got more to talk about.
Living in a post-impeachment world, what can Democrats do to get a Republican to stand up to Trump, if anything? We'll discuss that next.
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[16:30:00]
