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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Anonymous Op-Ed Writer Revealed Who Detailed Resistance Inside the White House; New Jersey's Largest City Imposes Shutdown Measures Amid Surge; Interview with Gov. Phil Murphy (D) New Jersey on COVID Playbook; Dow Drops Sharply as Virus Surges and Election Nears. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired October 28, 2020 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: We now know who the senior administration official was who wrote that alarming 2018 "New York Times" op-ed titled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," which detailed how the author and other members of the Trump administration deliberately worked to undermine orders by President Trump for the good of the nation because they believed President Trump was amoral and damaging the United States.

The official also wrote a book called "A Warning" published late last year. Now CNN has learned the identity of that "Anonymous" author which has been a source of a great deal of speculation. That anonymous senior administration official is now the former Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor.

In a lengthy statement just released, Taylor says, quote, I wrote a warning, a character study of the current commander in chief and a caution to voters that it wasn't as bad as it looked inside the Trump administration, it was worse.

While I claim sole authorship of the work, the sentiments expressed within it were widely held among officials at the highest levels of the federal government. In other words, Trump's own lieutenants were alarmed by his instability.

Taylor, who has now become an outspoken critic of President Trump publicly explains in this statement that he remained anonymous in the op-ed so the focus could stay on his words instead of Trump's insults.

Taylor is now revealing his identity six days before election day, warning that President Trump will be unbound in a second term and push the limits of his power and that President Trump has made the U.S. less safe and less united.

Taylor adding in his statement, quote, I was wrong, however, about one major assertion in my original op-ed. The country cannot rely on well- intentioned unelected bureaucrats around the President to steer him toward what's right. He has purged most of them, anyway. Nor can the country rely on Congress to deliver us from Trump's wayward whims. The people themselves are the ultimate check on the nation's chief executive.

Now after the release of the 2018 op-ed, President Trump called it gutless and a disgrace. He questioned on Twitter whether it was treason, and the White House Press Secretary at the time, Sarah Sanders, said, quote, this coward should do the right thing and resign.

We have reached out to the White House for comment on the newly revealed identity. We will bring that to you when we get it. We should note that Miles Taylor is also now a CNN contributor, although we did not know this until today.

Let's discuss this breaking news, Kaitlan Collins, let's go to you. I don't know if you had a chance to get a response from the White House or not, but what's your take on it all?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: We haven't heard from them yet, obviously, since you just broke this, Jake. But White House officials have been talking about this all afternoon waiting for this news to come out.

I do think some of them will be relieved that it's not someone new that is criticizing the administration, someone who has worked here. Obviously, they knew Miles Taylor was a critic of theirs since he revealed his criticism and endorsed Joe Biden around the Republican convention.

But he certainly was someone who was a top aide to the former DHS Secretary Kirsten Nielsen. He worked for her for two years and was in these meetings with President Trump, other top aides, people like John Kelly, he knows Chad Wolf, the acting DHS Secretary now.

But I do think the White House has this sense of anxiety that this could be a top military general or someone of that nature that was going to come out just a few days before the election, and Miles Taylor is someone that they are familiar with.

They do know that he has been critical of what the President has said and has revealed things the President has said about immigration policy in private meetings. You know, these damning statements coming from the President of what he said when he believes it's just his top aides around the room, things that Miles Taylor has revealed since he came out and endorsed Joe Biden.

But I do think there will be a sense of relief that it's not someone that they weren't aware of that had already been critical of the President to a degree -- Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Kaitlan Collins, thank you so much. Stay with us, and obviously if the White House has a statement about this, please bring that to us.

Let's bring in our team here to discuss the identity of "Anonymous," of course, was a huge source of speculation inside the White House and outside the White House. Nia-Malika, Miles Taylor, former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff, who has already come forward and shared a number of alarming stories that he witnessed firsthand about the President. Are you surprised that he's "Anonymous"?

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: Not really. Listen, this was a big guessing game for months and months and months when that op-ed came out, and when the book came out and Miles Taylor since then has revealed himself to be a harsh critic of this President and now, he has revealed himself to be "Anonymous."

I do agree with Kaitlan this idea that at least for the White House it's not someone new. At least it's not somebody who is very, very high up in the administration. There are all sorts of guesses about who it could be, and so the fact it's Miles Taylor, somebody who we all know and all know his very forceful criticism of this President, I think, in that way the White House should be relieved.

But listen, it adds to the list of names we have from this White House.

[15:35:00]

People like Olivia Troye, who has criticized the President in terms of his response or lack of response to the pandemic.

But listen, this mystery is finally solved and I'm sure we'll hear more from Miles Taylor and perhaps more people, right, in the coming days. There's been a bit of a trickle of ex-officials criticizing this President.

TAPPER: Gloria Borger, your response?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I agree with Nia. I think it won't come as a surprise to them since they've seen him publicly be so critical on our air. I think it does raise the question again, which was his initial argument, which is we people are staying inside the White House because you need to know that there are some adults in the room. And, you know, in his original article, he said, we're trying to do what's right even when Donald Trump won't, and then he wrote about this two-track presidency.

So the question is, are there any adults left in the room now? Miles Taylor is gone, Olivia Troye is gone, John Bolton has come out and said that the President is unfit for office.

So the question is, is it better to stay and be an adult left in the room and try and right the ship, which clearly people are baling every day, or would it have been better and more noble to just say who he was at the outset and leave when he felt that he could no longer affect change in the Trump administration earlier on?

TAPPER: And, Kaitlan, Taylor, Miles Taylor also says in the statement, quote, make no mistake I am a Republican and I wanted this President to succeed, but too often in times of crisis, Donald Trump has proven he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failure so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives. I witnessed Trump's inability to do his job over the course of two and a half years inside the administration. Everyone saw it. Though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals.

Kaitlan, we're six days out from election day. This does bring, even though I'm sure they're breathing a sigh of relief that it's not, you know, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It's still renewing the idea that this is an unprecedented situation. We've never seen so many people work for a President of the United States, then leave his office and say, boy, that guy is not fit to be President. It's simply never happened.

COLLINS: Yes, and Jake, you got to go back and remember when this anonymous op-ed first came out and was published by the "New York Times," how it sent shock waves through the West Wing, because people were reading this and were stunned that someone was going to these lengths in this op-ed, putting out this statement about the President, of course, condemning his character and his leadership.

And at the time I remember the President came out to an event and had it printed out and was furious over it, and was saying, you know, something like this has never happened to past presidents. And I do think that's something that's important to point out, is that we've never seen a Chief of Staff to a DHS Secretary come out and be so critical of the President.

And now Miles Taylor went about it in a very different way, writing this book, writing this op-ed and now coming out. But we have seen other officials come out on the record with their criticisms of the President.

TAPPER: Well, we've had criticisms not just Miles Taylor, the former Chief of Staff of Department of Homeland Security, Nia, but we've had just eviscerating criticisms from former Defense Secretary Mattis.

I reported really tough words that former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has had for the President Trump. It goes on and on. I mean President Trump is right in the sense, Nia, that no other president has had this happen to him before. But the converse is true. No other President has created a situation where so many officials thought they needed to warn the country about what they saw.

HENDERSON: I think that's right. And it also begs the question of why these folks chose to join the administration and continue in the administration? It was clear who Donald Trump was as he was running for the presidency in 2016. Some of his sentiments he made very clear about immigrants, about people of color, about Muslims.

So, you know, folks -- Jim Mattis came out of retirement to go serve in this administration, served for a few years, and so now the idea that he has discovered something about Donald Trump, it wasn't clear many, many years about Donald Trump. I mean, it's a little hard to believe. I mean was he that naive? Did he think he could really change the ways of a man who is in his 70s and his record and rhetoric were very clear? So listen, I think these folks will have to do a lot of soul searching

about why they stayed, why they went in, in the first place, and obviously they have very different things to say at this point after serving.

[15:40:00]

TAPPER: Gloria Borger, you might have some insight into why somebody joins the Trump administration and tries to be ballast in the ship. I mean you talk to a lot of people who have tried to do that.

BORGER: Right. I do.

TAPPER: What do they say?

BORGER: I do, and I think there were good, decent, honest people who made a decision that going into government was the right thing to do because while Donald Trump did not have a lot of experience, they did have a lot of experience. And that this was somebody who had never been elected to public office before, and they felt that they could help him and help the administration.

And one by one, they became so upset with the way this President behaved, with the way he ran his government, with his attitudes towards Washington and the so-called deep state and officials at the State Department and diplomats abroad. And how he managed his relationships with foreign governments that they became so disenchanted, they left.

And so, in a way, anonymous has been beaten at his own game by those who left and decided to come out before he did. Because there have been many people. When he wrote this in September of 2018, it was the very beginning. It was the first crack. And that's what got people so upset at the White House and all over Washington, was, oh, my god, who is this person? How high up is this person? And what else does this person know, and is there a mole in the White House?

And that's why the President was so upset, as Kaitlan is pointing out, because they didn't know who it was. Now what we've seen unfold over the last year is that one by one, people have been leaving and telling their story in different ways.

I mean, there are people who say that Kelly should have been more forthcoming, for example, Jake. John Bolton, people saying he should have testified before Congress, but he certainly did criticize the President when his book came out.

So, you know, there have been others who have been doing this all along, including the man we now know to be "Anonymous" who has been doing it publicly.

COLLINS: Jake, can I just say --

TAPPER: Go ahead.

COLLINS: One more thing, one thing that this does shed a light on, people ware going to question Miles Taylor's motives here. He's denied being "Anonymous" before since he came out criticizing the President. They're going to look back at all the interactions he had with senior officials since writing that op-ed before he came out publicly and endorsed Joe Biden.

But I do want to say one thing that really reflects the sentiment and the feelings of people who worked inside this White House, is that when this first came out, the guessing game of who this was, was wide, it was expansive, it included cabinet officials, top people to the President.

And just that sentiment alone, that people inside the White House who worked for President Trump believed that their closest colleagues, who were in intimate with them, could have been the person to write this, does really show you what the attitude and the atmosphere is like inside this White House.

TAPPER: Yes, I mean, the other thing that's, you know, not really being discussed is whether or not everything Miles Taylor says is true. It's just a question of his motivations and this and that, but like, what about what he's saying? Anyway, thanks, one and all, for joining us.

As coronavirus cases spike in parts of New Jersey, extreme restrictions are back in place, but are the new rules tough enough? The Governor of the Garden State joins me next.

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[15:45:00]

TAPPER: In our NATIONAL LEAD, leaders of the largest city in New Jersey, that's Newark, New Jersey, are initiating extreme measures as that city experiences another huge spike in COVID cases. An astounding 25 percent positivity rate reported over the past several days has prompted the Mayor of Newark to impose a 8:00 curfew for non-essential indoor businesses, including restaurants.

Joining me now is the Democratic Governor of the Garden State, New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy.

Governor Murphy, why are cases exponentially surging in Newark specifically, do you think?

GOV. PHIL MURPHY (D-NJ): Good to be with you, Jake. It's not just Newark. We had it in Lakewood a few weeks ago. It is certainly Newark and I want to give a big shoutout to the Mayor Ras Baraka who's dong doing a good job and we are in deep partnership with him.

It's up and down the state. It's especially in the metro New York counties when you and I were first talking about this in the spring were the early hot spots, they are again. A lot of this feels like it's in private spaces, which makes it harder. Because in many cases this is people letting their hair down in their home or watching -- having folks over to watch a football game. And it's hard to enforce that compliance. But we will plus up tracing capacity, testing capacity, plus up

enforcement where we can enforce, and also use our bullhorn, including not just in English but in the case of Newark especially, in Portuguese.

TAPPER: Do you anticipate the rest of the state could be seeing similar shutdown measures like those in Newark soon?

[15:50:00]

MURPHY: I hope not. I mean the playbook I just described that we're plussed up and the Newark is the one that we did working with Lakewood's leadership and faith leaders there a couple of weeks ago and that feels like it worked.

So our hope is that we can keep addressing these with scalpel steps like those, but there's no question, Jake, you know, we had 1,692 positive cases today. We're now up over a thousand in hospitals. Fourteen more sadly losses of life. We're not out of the woods yet, we're not alone obviously. But we as you know had come a long way. It's slipping. Cold weather, Fatigue, I think those are probably our two biggest challenges right now.

TAPPER: You said today that all options are on the table for combating the virus in New Jersey. What are some of the more extreme options that you are not yet initiating but that are on the table?

MURPHY: Well, in the spring, as you know, we shut down our entire school system. We were one of the first states in America to shut the whole place down. We just don't see the incidents of transmission, for instance, inside of our schools. We monitor that very closely. There's a whole series of different models right now, hybrid, remote, in- person or combinations. That is an example of something I don't anticipate.

We also were -- we were very cautious and incremental in how we opened. And so we're actually still at low capacities. I'll give you an example on indoor dining, we're still only at 25 percent and that's for a reason. We wanted to make sure we got this right.

I don't see us going -- we take a step back from 25 percent and you're closing again which, please, god, we're not going to have to do.

TAPPER: New Jersey was one of the hardest hit states when COVID first hit the U.S. you did get under some semblance of control. So we are here again you think because people are congregating indoors, because it's cold and also because of virus fatigue, people are just kind of like giving up and just having friends over. Is that really why we're seeing this spike?

MURPHY: Yes, I think that's a big part of it, Jake. I mean in Lakewood there were some transmission around, high religious holidays. I would head higher ed outbreaks.

But when you really cut through the higher ed outbreaks, it's people congregating inside, whether it's your house or a fraternity or wherever it might be, off-campus housing. It's a lot of indoor activity which is being driven by the fact we don't have the options outside like we did a couple of months ago and folks letting their guard down which is why I got to plead with folks if they're watching, don't let your guard down.

You know, we're desperately hoping for a vaccine, for therapeutics but we don't have them yet. So, it's social distancing, face coverings, washing your hands with soap and water, taking your yourself off the field if you've been exposed, it's the basic stuff. That's the hand we have to play.

TAPPER: All right, Democratic Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, thank you and best of luck to the good citizens of that state. We appreciate it.

We have some breaking news straight ahead. The final CNN poll before election day. Taking a look at where Joe Biden is, where Donald Trump is in the

final stretch.

Stay with us.

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[15:55:00]

TAPPER: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. We start with breaking news in the MONEY LEAD.

A meltdown on Wall Street today with the Dow taking yet another major plunge right before the closing bell. It's about to end the day down more than 900 points.

I want to bring in CNN's Alison Kosik, Alison, not a good sign for the United States when you couple this, of course, with a worsening pandemic and an election just a few days away.

ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: And those are the big worries that are weighing on Wall Street. Anxiety just gripping the market today as worries ramp up about the rising number of COVID cases around the world. That's just one of the things that weighed on Wall Street today.

Stocks also sinking as we get closer to election day now about six days away, I think. And investors are concerned about the outcome of the election. Not only because it's known that it's going to be probably delayed before we know the winner of the election but because the outcome, the result of the election could be contested.

And then one of the things kind of keeping the economy on training wheels, a stimulus package. Well, a new stimulus package for businesses and Americans now nowhere in sight. It's all causing a lot of uncertainty and causing the heavy volume and major losses that we are seeing today -- Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Alison Kosik, thank you so much. Appreciate it. And we have some more breaking news for you now in our 2020 LEAD. The

final CNN national poll on the Trump/Biden race just six days out from election day, it's one of the last key indicators of where the race stands during this critical final sprint.

CNN political director David Chalian joins me now at the polls. And David, obviously, you and I talk about this all the time. Our system is not a national popular vote system, it's state-by-state. So tell us what this poll shows and what that might mean for the race.

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: It's such an important reminder, Jake, it is that battle state-by-state for 270 electoral votes. But this final pre-election national poll does show us the mood of the country and shows us some specific trends that we're seeing.

So take a look at that overall horse race number.