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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip

House Panel Releases Bombshell Report in Gaetz Probe; Trump Threatens to Retake Control Panama Canal Over Fees; Trump Revives Interest in Obtaining Greenland from Denmark. "NewsNight" Discusses Pardons Given By President Biden; A New CNN Film Features The Story Of King Of Love Songs Luther Vandross; "NewsNight" Discusses A Heinous Act On A New York City Subway. Aired 10-11p ET

Aired December 23, 2024 - 22:00   ET

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

[22:00:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Tonight, he sins (ph), a congressional report on Matt Gaetz goes public and lays out evidence the former congressman paid prostitutes, did cocaine and committed statutory rape.

Plus, an act of faith or an expression of cynicism? Joe Biden spares 37 inmates on death row from the ultimate sentence, inviting outrage and questions about capital punishment's place in 2024.

And a brutal murder aboard a New York City subway stokes fears about spiraling crime in cities.

Live at the table, Mondaire Jones, Melik Abdul, Jim Geraghty, Maria Cardona and Elliot Williams.

Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here, they do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Good evening. I'm Abby Philip in Washington.

Let's get right to what America is talking about, sunshine on Matt Gaetz's misdeeds. What the former congressman wanted to say, buried, is now public. A House Ethics Committee report that details plain gross behavior, the kind of house of cards like criminality that people believe happens in Washington, a lot of gifts, drugs, prostitutes, and perhaps statutory rape. The committee says that they have, quote, all of the above.

Elliot Williams joins us on our panel now. He's a CNN legal analyst and was deputy assistant attorney general for Legislative Affairs under the Obama administration.

I think the big blockbuster headline of this report is what it says about Matt Gaetz and Victim A. So, let me read this. The committee received testimony that Victim A and Representative Gaetz had sex twice during the party, including at least once in the presence of other party attendees. Victim A recalled receiving $400 in cash from Representative Gaetz that evening, which she understood to be payment for sex.

At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school. Victim A said she did not inform Representative Gaetz that she was under 18 at the time nor did he ask her age.

This, in a way -- first of all, I want you to tell us why this would be in an ethics report and why this would not have resulted in criminal charges? But, I mean, this kind of conduct, I mean, I think there's a reason that people's eyebrows raise at a person who, you know, in their 30s basically was conducting themselves like this as a member of Congress.

ELLIOT WILLIAMS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes. Why it's not charged with a crime? It's a million dollar question that people care the most about, because it's plainly, if true, illegal conduct. In order to charge someone with a crime in the first place, you have to have what's called probable cause, which means it's more likely than not that it happened. That sort of seems to be what you have here. The problem is that in order to move forward with a criminal prosecution, prosecutors need to be able to. Prove beyond a reasonable doubt that something happened. And that's a very, very high standard.

PHILLIP: Perhaps that he knew that she was under 18? You don't think that he has to prove that?

WILLIAMS: Not in a statutory rape case. You do not need to know. It's called a strict liability offense. And the perpetrator does not need to know the actual age of the person and can actually believe they're 18 and still be convicted. It's called a strict liability offense.

The problem here is that the evidence isn't that great in terms of a criminal prosecution. You have witnesses or victims that may have been under the influence of substances that you'd have to put on the stand. The report also notes that a lot of them didn't want to come forward and testify and they wanted to leave their testimony where it was before. And that's just hard to bring a case with. So, that's really it.

Now, it certainly hits the standard for an ethics report. It's unethical behavior. It's for someone's employment. Yes. He should lose his job over it. But charging him with a crime, they probably couldn't get there.

PHILLIP: How much of this was whispered about on Capitol Hill? I mean, it seems like a lot of it.

FMR. REP. MONDAIRE JONES (D-NY): Yes. Look, I mean, having served with Matt, these rumors had been out in the open. There was no whispering about it. In fact, we saw a lot of it come out during the 15 or so ballots that it took to elect Speaker McCarthy, then the first speaker of the House under this past Republican majority. [22:05:07]

You have colleagues, Republican colleagues of his, going out in the open talking about the images that he has shared on the House floor and so on and so forth.

I want to be clear that there's nothing extraordinary about releasing this report after the Ethics Committee itself has lost jurisdiction. There have been moments throughout history where that has happened there. There's been some effort to say that this is some kind of vendetta by the Ethics Committee. That's not true at all. And when I saw in the paper today that David Joyce and Andrew Garbarino were to two Republicans who joined with the Democrats on the Ethics Committee -- and I served on the Ethics Committee. And in particular David Joyce and I overlapped, and these are men of integrity, certainly more so than many of the other colleagues of theirs. And I'm not surprised that they were the ones to do the right thing when it comes to releasing a document of great public importance. It is crazy that he was about to be the attorney general of the United States. And for this reason, among others, none of Donald Trump's nominees deserve the benefit of the doubt moving forward given what we just read in this report.

PHILLIP: That is part of the thing is that Trump and his people knew about these allegations. And they said, you know what, Matt Gaetz for attorney general. That should really shock a lot of people in this country, even if this has not been criminally charged conduct. Even the allegations 10 years ago, 15 years ago, would have been absolutely career-ending for anyone, let alone anybody who was nominated to a federal office.

MELIK ABDUL, RADIO HOST AND GOP POLITICAL STRATEGIST: Well, I want to say thank you for having me here and Merry Christmas to my mama down in Mississippi and my daddy down in the great state of Jackson, Mississippi.

But I'll say this. I'm not a fan of Matt Gaetz and I've said this many times. I am not a fan of Matt Gaetz. He joined 208 Democrats to oust Kevin McCarthy. So, for me, it's a no when it comes to Matt Gaetz. But I thought that the ethics report should come out when he was in contention for the A.G. slot. There isn't -- it isn't typical that these reports come out after a member is gone. It is something that has happened before I'm not a fan of it coming out here. But I think what it also speaks to with this issue of Matt Gaetz, as horrible as the allegations are, and let's be clear, these are allegations. We saw similar allegations against Justice Kavanaugh that --

PHILLIP: Although to be clear and in defense of Justice Kavanaugh, honestly, he actually was not accused of things like this. He was not.

ABDUL: No. This is isn't real-time.

PHILLIP: He was not accused -- no, he was not of anything like this, actually.

ABDUL: Well, I'm saying as far as allegations, because there was literally a hearing, in his confirmation here, and it came up during his confirmation hearing. So, we need to be careful on this notion that these are allegations. There is no criminality attached to it yet. It may be, but I think we need to be careful with that.

I'm not a fan of the report coming out at this point. And what Matt Gaetz said if you saw him over the week and he kind of alluded to, well, maybe I'll introduce -- and I can't remember what these articles are about him.

PHILLIP: Yes. Well, he -- I think this is what you're going to talk about. He's he says maybe he'll show up at Congress in January participate in the speaker election basically to punish Speaker Johnson, perhaps, for allowing this to happen, perhaps, for how he handled --

JONES: Oh, he's going to take it out on everybody.

PHILLIP: How he handled the budget, take the oath, filed a privileged motion, he says, to expose every, quote, MeToo settlement paid using public funds, even for former members, he says, and then resign and start his OANN program.

ABDUL: That's what I'm not a fan of the guy.

MARIA CARDONA, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: And so the GOP should do everything they can to keep him from ever coming anywhere near the Capitol.

But Mondaire brought up a very important point. This goes to the question of judgment, of the judgment of the president-elect, who knew very well what these allegations were, and didn't care, and in fact probably celebrated them because he himself is a convicted felon, and maybe birds of a feather, I don't know, maybe he wanted company.

But the fact of the matter is that he wanted to either say to the American people, these things don't really matter, these values, you know, whatever, or he wanted to pull the wool over the American people's eyes so that they weren't really aware just how serious these allegations were. Because let's remember, he wanted to push through this nomination during a recess. He did not even want this to go through the process, because he probably knew.

PHILLIP: He might have been forced to do that, because I think there was a significant amount of opposition to Matt Gaetz. I do want to read --

CARDONA: As there should be.

PHILLIP: I want to read this response from him today. He says, giving funds to someone you're dating that they didn't ask for, and that isn't charged for sex, is now prostitution? There is a reason to me they did this on a Christmas Eve report, not in a courtroom of any kind, where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses.

[22:10:04] This testimony from one alleged prostitute, you won't see in the report. And the testimony that he highlights the person says that they never solicited payment for sex.

WILLIAMS: Yes. I think if you're quibbling about whether the person you paid for sex was, in fact, a sex worker, you're probably losing the narrative there.

Now, underlying that, though, is this point that he's making that, well, I didn't have a chance to call witnesses, or I did not have a chance to have my day in court. And he's forgetting -- this is what we were talking about a little bit earlier. This is really an employment proceeding and an ethics proceeding. It's not a criminal prosecution. He's not entitled to the same measure of due process that he would have had he gone to court.

And so, you know, the House did a bipartisan and, you know, to your point, Mondaire, not to Congressmansplain you, but it's the only committee in the House that's equal Democrats and Republicans. It's equally divided.

JONES: Five Democrats, five Republicans.

WILLIAMS: So, they have to act in a bipartisan manner. So, to give you a sense of how strongly this committee must have felt about how disgusting this conduct was, this alleged conduct, to be clear, you know, they worked hand in hand on it.

JONES: And there is voluminous documentation in the appendices to this report, okay? Contemporaneous text messages, Venmo transactions. I mean, knock it off. But this is nothing like the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh in terms of the documentary evidence and the witness after witness --

ABDUL: But the point is about the allegation, something that isn't proven. And I think that if we're going to talk about Donald Trump, I'm not sure, and I don't know if you guys know, if Donald Trump or anyone knew the extent of these sort of allegations. We've heard murmurings of maybe there was a 17-year-old and maybe things here, but we didn't know this right here.

CARDONA: But this is the issue. It shouldn't matter that he didn't know the details of --

ABDUL: It should matter.

CARDONA: No.

ABDUL: When it comes to an allegation?

CARDONA: No, I'm sorry. What I'm talking -- allegations for criminality, maybe. But when it comes to the judgment of appointing somebody for attorney general, those kinds of details should not matter. Those kinds of allegations are in the ether. You say, next, because is there -- it doesn't matter. Everyone is saying -- no. Everyone is saying -- ABDUL: It's not proven, and we're dealing with the fact that the Department of Justice declined to pursue you for any type of criminality.

CARDONA: If you think that matters, then you don't have --

PHILLIP: Maria and Melik, just a second.

ABDUL: Well, I have judgment. I just don't agree with you,

PHILLIP: Give me one second. I mean, look, I think that Maria's point is well-taken that for most presidents -- this is not a Trump thing -- for most presidents, if there was an allegation of anything even in the ballpark of what is on the paper here, it would not even be a question. It would come up in the vet. They would probably be ruled out. And we wouldn't even be having this conversation. That didn't happen in this case because -- probably because Matt Gaetz is a loyalist.

One of the other allegations in here is that he actually used his official office to help one of these women. In 2018, according to this report, Representative Gaetz arranged for his chief of staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the United States Department of State that she was a constituent. I mean, it's not just his private behavior now, it's also his public behavior.

ABDUL: Yes, and even that, that is a problem. And if that's something that Donald Trump knew, we should be able to criticize him for that. But saying that just because it was in an ethics report, it's a bipartisan report, and I imagine that they had much more access to information that we simply don't have.

Sure, the allegations are truly bad. I said, I'm not a Matt Gaetz fan, so you're never going to get me to come out and stump for Matt Gaetz. But what I will say, and I'm consistent with this, the fact that these aren't normally released, I don't think that it should have been released in this case.

WILLIAMS: Just to one point you've made, though, you know, to this question of, well, maybe there was a 17-year-old, how many Republican lawyers are there at the highest levels of government and business now who don't have questions about whether they might or might not have --

ABDUL: Many.

WILLIAMS: So, there you go. I mean, I just think the body of people from whom the former president --

JONES: We're really leaving out the drug use allegations.

WILLIAMS: Oh, yes, no, let's not even talk about these things.

PHILLIP: I mean, we didn't even -- we're at the end of the segment. We didn't even get to all of the drug use. I mean, one of the explanations Matt Gaetz has for all of this was that he was young and wild, I guess. And he wasn't -- I mean, he wasn't that young and I don't know that that's much of an excuse.

CARDONA: He was still a congressman.

ABDUL: It's no excuse, even if he wasn't a congressman.

PHILLIP: Even if he wasn't a congressman. Everyone, stick around, much more ahead.

Coming up, how will Donald Trump's worldview change America's foreign policy? We have another special guest joining us to discuss that.

Plus, President Biden commuting sentences is for nearly all federal death penalty prisoners.

[22:15:04]

Did he make the right call there? Our panel is going to debate that ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIP: Tonight, Donald Trump versus the world. The president- elect's global approach is becoming more clear as borrows a little from a Silicon Valley maxim, move fast and get paid. Listen to him lay out his approach to a key shipping channel in the Panama Canal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT ELECT: Has anyone ever heard of the Panama Canal? Because we're being ripped off at the Panama Canal like we're being ripped off everywhere else.

It was given to Panama and to the people of Panama but it has provisions.

[22:20:00]

You got to treat us fairly, and they haven't treated us fairly. If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America in full, quickly, and without question.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Joining us at the table is Josh Rogin. He's a columnist at The Washington Post and author of Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. Also with us, Jim Geraghty is sitting at the table.

Josh, it could not be a more apt title for this conversation. Hear me out here on the Panama Canal. Is Trump onto something?

JOSH ROGIN, COLUMNIST, THE WASHINGTON POST: No. Oh, sorry. Did you want me to -- you had a -- there was a longer question there.

PHILLIP: It was a longer, yes. I mean, okay. So, let me --

ROGIN: Yes, sorry.

JIM GERAGHTY, SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, NATIONAL REVIEW: Onto something or on something? I just want to clarify those points.

PHILLIP: Let me make the case as Trump sees it.

ROGIN: Go ahead. Okay?

PHILLIP: The United States invested an enormous amount of blood, sweat, and tears, literally many, many Americans killed in building the Panama Canal into this incredibly critical thoroughfare, right? China is trying to come in and basically buy its way into dominance in the Panama Canal. Panama is seeing the dollar signs and saying, oh, maybe we might sidle up to China. Is there a national security imperative for the United States to reverse that trend?

ROGIN: Right. So, you know, we agreed -- the United States agreed to hand over control of the Panama Canal to the Panama people and to the government of Panama in the 70s, 50 years ago. And that's not up for renegotiation. There's no scenario under which we could get it back even if we wanted to, other than invading Panama, which is a scenario, a very stupid scenario, but not a scenario that would actually happen in real life in 2025.

So, what Trump is really talking about is, yes, there's a kernel of a real issue here, which is that the Chinese have invested heavily in the maintenance of the canal that we purchased and that we built, and that we abandoned. And now they've given the government of Panama a billion dollars for a bridge. They've gotten the contracts through a fair process to manage the ports. And the reason that Central and South American countries are leaning towards China is because China approaches them with investment and with money, and we approach them with threats and stupid threats at that. And if you were Panama, which one would you choose?

So, this is not only the completely wrong way to approach the U.S. relationship with Panama, it's the completely wrong way to approach the U.S. competition with China. Because anywhere you go in the world, there's a Chinese company or the Chinese government offering incentives. And if Donald Trump is going to go around offering threats and, you know, threats that are not credible at that, of course, these countries are going to go towards China. That's exactly what happened. Xi Jinping went right back to the government of Panama and said, we're with you, we stand with the sovereignty of Panama. And they're actually on the right side of the issue, we're on the wrong side of the issue. And that's, again, a really unforced error.

PHILLIP: I really did not have threats against Panama and Greenland.

ROGIN: Right. Is this a priority, by the way? Is there nothing else going on in the world?

PHILLIP: Well, you know, I mean, he says -- Trump says as he announces his ambassador to Greenland, for the purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.

I mean, does Trump envision Greenland, Panama, Canada, as opportunities for the United States to go back into an era of like colonialism, where we just like take what we want.

GERAGHTY: Abby, this is all part of ending the forever wars by threatening new forever wars everywhere else to get us out of the old ones.

On the issue of Panama, they used to be allies with Taiwan. They ended their relationship with Taiwan. They've joined China's Belt and Road Initiative. They've got Chinese-controlled ports on both sides of them. There's a reason for the U.S. to be paying attention to this. With Trump, you have basically have three settings. You have outright strikes, like killing Soleimani in Iraq way back towards the end of his first term. You have threats and bluster, or you have ignoring them, threats and bluster, as close as we're going to get to paying attention to the Central America and to this region.

So look, as bad as this is, as ominous as this is, we know that Trump -- the entire first term, he talked about we were going to acquire Greenland. And he re-tweeted the image of a Trump casino on the empty plains of Greenland. I think he just liked that. I think he just likes the idea of acquiring things. But I noticed in the first Trump term, we did not acquire any new territories. We did not invade any other place. We took a few strikes here and there. We didn't do much against ISIS.

ROGIN: But we did damage a bunch of alliances, and that's what we're doing here. We're damaging our alliance with Denmark for no reason, over a bunch of stupidity. We're damaging our partnership with Panama for no reason, over a bunch of stupidity, and it just goes on and on from there.

ABDUL: Are we really damaging it, though? I mean, I get that Donald Trump -- well, yes, that's the set that, remember, Justin Trudeau, after Donald Trump threatened tariffs, Justin Trudeau ended up going down to Mar-a-Lago.

[22:25:04]

I think that this idea that world leaders, and I think you're now saying that when Donald Trump, when he was over at the -- over in France, you saw world leaders coming to Donald Trump and realizing that he's the president of the United States.

I do agree with this idea that Donald Trump -- this is more of a signal. We're not going to get Greenland. Let's just be clear. We're not going to get to Panama. We're not going to get to Panama Canal. So, anybody thinking that we're going to get it. We're literally not going to get it. But I think that Donald Trump drawing attention to the issue that you mentioned about China's influence, but not just in the Panama Canal, but around the world, the Belt and Road Initiative, what China is doing in places all around the world is while the United States may go in aggressively and build military establishment, China is actually building infrastructure, partnering with places, even in Africa, to build infrastructure.

So, I think that Donald Trump -- you know, we're not going to get Greenland and --

CARDONA: What he's doing does not go to the end that he says he wants to work on, which is actually competing with China in a smart and strategic way. He's doing it in a ridiculously stupid way to, yes, garner press, garner social media attention. You know, his base loves it, but he's actually doing what he has always done, which is lie to his voters, lie to the people that support him because he thinks they're stupid or he is stupid. Because the way that up, the way that he's engaging in this is not in the best interest of the national security of the United States or even the economic security of the United States.

ABDUL: People said the very same thing about Donald Trump throughout his time, even when he was president. The fact that Donald Trump looked --

CARDONA: It's still true.

ABDUL: It may be true but 76 billion Americans said we don't have a problem.

(CROSSTALKS)

ABDUL: It doesn't mean that they're wrong, though. It doesn't mean that --

ROGIN: Yes. But they may want cheaper eggs, but it doesn't mean they want to invade Panama, okay? So, those are three different things.

ABDUL: Nobody signed up for that.

ROGIN: So, let's not say the American people are going to sign up for that. And think about what happened in the first term.

PHILLIP: One at a time, please. We can't all hear you at the same time.

ROGIN: Sorry. Think about what happened in the first term. He threatened a bunch of countries. Sometimes the extortion works, right? Sometimes the country's paid up to the threats. That doesn't mean it's a good thing to do. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. It's like if Tony Soprano ran a country. Oh, nice finale that you got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. You know, sometimes people will buckle under that pressure, but that's not what American foreign policy should or --

PHILLIP: I mean, should we take seriously and embolden Trump really actually legitimately seeing just acquisition as in his future? He didn't do it in the first term. I don't think we can rule out that he's not going to attempt it. GERAGHTY: This is a mild version of the madman theory that you really never know exactly what Trump is going to do, that old saying, take him seriously but not literally.

Look, we're not invading Panama today. We're probably not going to invade Panama anytime soon, but there's that back of the mind of every world leader that question of, well, what will Trump do? I hope, you know, -- was Trump -- Trump was willing to take, you know, to take out Soleimani on Iraqi soil that the U.S. had several opportunities to take beforehand, but it was deemed kind of provocative and risky.

Donald Trump is not afraid of being provocative. Every move in Ukraine with the Biden administration, there's been this hesitation about taking, well, do we want to be escalatory? Will it be seen as provocative by Vladimir Putin? Donald Trump doesn't care if anybody sees him as provocative.

ROGIN: Right, but being provocative and thuggish with enemies is one thing. Being provocative and thuggish with allies is a completely different thing, okay? And if you want to be tough on Iran, I don't think you'll get a lot of people behind that. If you want to be tough on Putin, and I hope President Trump decides someday to be tough on Putin, you'll get a lot of people behind that.

Being tough on Canada, okay, that's a different ball of wax. And unpredictability is only good if it's intentional. If it's not intentional, then it's just a mess.

PHILLIP: Before we go, I mean, I will leave you with this image that Trump shared, an A.I.-generated image of him staring over Canada. You know, I mean, I guess he's just trolling.

CARDONA: Wow.

ABDUL: I don't think this is the Trump doctrine.

PHILLIP: But, anyway, buckle up, America. January 20th will be here very soon. Josh Rogin, Melik Abdul, thank you for joining us. Everyone else hang tight.

Coming up next, President Biden commuting sentences for most federal death row inmates ahead of President-elect Trump's return to the office of the presidency. Our panel is going to discuss that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:30:00]

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight, spared in one of his final acts as President Joe Biden literally giving life to 37 death row inmates. Biden commuted the sentences of those prisoners barring the government from following through on the executions.

He said in a statement that he condemns the murders but that, quote, "We must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted."

Elliott Williams is back so is Mondaire Jones. This is controversial to say the least. These are bad people. They're murderers. They've done -- some of them, many crimes but the principle here is that the death penalty is a -- extremely flawed system and that it should not just -- it should simply not be the role of the government to be killing people.

JIM GERAGHTY, "NATIONAL REVIEW" SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, but apparently not so flawed for the Charleston church shooter or the Tree of Life synagogue shooter or for the baby brother bomber of the world. So, Biden made a principled statement that the federal government should not be -- except for these guys -- we can we can burn them.

PHILLIP: I mean he described that this is the what the government kind of -- they created this carve-out and to your point, not clear why but the carve-out is terrorism and hate motivated mass shootings but because there are so many other categories.

[22:35:00]

PHILLIP: And one person who was commuted --

GERAGHTY: Jorge Avila Torrez who was a serial killer rapist who killed and murdered -- sexually assaulted an eight-year-old and nine- year-old.

PHILLIP: And there was another one.

GERAGHTY: Good call, Mr. President. Yes, that's somebody who deserves some empathy.

PHILLIP: Kaboni Savage killed 12 people in connection to a drug enterprise so that's a lot of mass killing. But to your point, I mean, it's just a category that they created. What are the guidelines here?

GERAGHTY: So, I think, well, one is if you've been on the cover of "Rolling Stone", you can't get a commutation of your -- baby brother bomber from Boston that one we can't let that one go. No, it basically is, if people have heard of you, well then we're not getting a commutation. But if you're an obscure -- if you were just a local crime story, if you only had one "Dateline" special, well then, you can have -- you're off death row.

And also, because look, the President pardoned his son. It was extremely controversial. He pardoned him for not just the crimes he committed but any other crimes he may have committed, as well. People pointed out that for four years, Joe Biden barely used the partner commutation powers that he had and now there's guilt. Now, there's this sense that we got to do something about this.

We got, oh, who's not there? They did the 1500 guys. They insisted they were non-violent offenders although one of them was named the black widow because she'd killed two husbands and one boyfriend in an insurance scam. It's not exactly -- we have this idea of non-violent offender doesn't mean a --

PHILLIP: This is a long-running issue right? I mean and you as a federal prosecutor, you tried a death penalty case.

ELLIOT WILLIAMS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: I have.

PHILLIP: So, you intimately know the system.

WILLIAMS: Oh, yes, and I do think this decision was a long-time coming. I'm sensitive to these arguments that, well, if you're going to end the federal death penalty and the federal death penalty and don't create this sort of ham-fisted explanation for why you're carving out three cases.

Because you know, Jim, as you'd put it, it was if people have heard of you, I would even be even more cynical and say that, well, if it's a politically sensitive case, right? Like the Tree of Life mattered or, you know, the Tsarnaev bombing.

PHILLIP: The Emmanuel shooting.

WILLIAMS: And that's not to minimize the suffering or the severity of the crimes. The simple fact is they whipped up a lot of the public and people know about them and that's why they were carved out. Now, the simple fact is you know we should have done away with the federal death penalty a long time ago and I say this as somebody who has tried hard to get people executed.

But it is a horribly inconsistent, horribly flawed process that just simply -- and recognizing how important justice and maybe even all these -- word vengeance is to the families of victims. And I understand that and I'm sensitive to it have worked with victims. But the simple fact is there is another solution to proceeding with federal executions.

PHILLIP: Yes, I mean what this statistic from the Death Penalty Information Center and Equal Justice Initiative for every eight people executed on death row, one person has been exonerated. That means there have been a lot of people who've been put to death probably by the government who were innocent.

MONDAIRE JONES (D) FORMER NEW YORK CONGRESSMAN: Absolutely, look at that -- that is inevitably the case. It's why I have opposed a death penalty since at least freshman year of high school. It is because of the imprecision of this. There's so much inaccuracy in our criminal legal system. And we know of so many cases where people have been wrongfully convicted have subsequently been exonerated.

And we've also learned of people who have been executed, who have been subsequently exonerated. I don't oppose a death penalty for reasons that other people do. Some people think it's inhumane for the government to ever execute anybody.

I don't -- I don't agree with that. I think it's racist in its application and it is inevitably an imprecise way of doling out punishment. Having said that, I would have been really pissed if those three individuals who he exempted from his other 37 commutations had not received the death penalty because we know that those people --

UNKNOWN: That's Jim's point. I know it's his point.

JONES: I guess the caveat I would add to that is we know those three people committed those crimes.

UNKNOWN: Yes.

JONES: So, can we execute them?

GERAGHTY: Yes.

PHILLIP: Well, I mean they are OK with --

UNKNOWN: Yes.

PHILLIP: But I mean --

GERAGHTY: But you just said you opposed the death penalty.

JONES: I'll admit to some inconsistency on this point.

GERAGHTY: All right, that's fine.

PHILLIP: What about -- what about what both Mondaire and Elliot were talking about? I am curious to your take on this.

GERAGHTY: Sure.

PHILLIP: The issues with the degree to which black people in particular are disproportionately given the death penalty, 41 percent of the death penalty population are African-Americans. The degree to which of those who are exonerated who are black a huge proportion of them are victims of official misconduct. So, what about those issues --

GERAGHTY: Yes.

PHILLIP: -- with the application of this -- this penalty?

GERAGHTY: Look, if there's any doubt, you don't want to see that person, you know, executed. You talk about the inner conflict. When Timothy McVeigh was executed, one-third of self-described death penalty opponents said they supported the execution.

So, I get the idea of this inner conflict and this sense of like in the very worst -- and if President Biden had come out and said you know what? I really oppose the death penalty for any case where there's any degree of doubt, anything where it's not proven.

But I don't have any doubt about the guilt of these three guys. I could respect that. I wouldn't necessarily -- that would be consistently -- there wouldn't necessarily be a consistent position.

PHILLIP: But that's a fair phraseology.

GERAGHTY: Yes.

MARIA CARDONA, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think, that's exactly where he was going.

[22:40:00]

But I do end up at the point where we, as a country, we should not be inconsistent about this. The humanity I get, right, and I agree with the mass murderers and the terrorists -- I think, personally, that they should be put to death. But I don't think the United States should be in a position to make those decisions as a country. We're the only democracy in the world that has capital punishment. We --the government of the United States should be above that.

And so, I think that commuting these sentences and putting them on, you know, life without parole, sometimes that's even worse than death. That's what I think is --is where the country should be. What I'm saying is we should be consistent.

JONES: I think that's a legitimate position. Maybe we could all agree with that. Many people agree with that. Many people agree that life without parole is a worse thing.

GERAGHTY: Eleven of these guys killed prison guards. So, when you say --

PHILLIP: There's actually several of them on the right who were exonerated not excuse me commuted.

GERAGHTY: It's not like there's no risk of these people ever killing anyone else again. If you're a federal prison guard maybe you're not such a big fan.

JONES: And they're going to be serving in prison for the rest of their lives.

WILLIAMS: Two final points. You know, one, if none of us here at this table can say for certain that we know that no innocent person has ever gotten the death penalty in America, we should not have a death penalty.

JONES: I agree.

CARDONA: Right.

UNKNOWN: That is my position. None of us can say with certainty that is my position. No one can, number one.

CARDONA: Mine, as well.

WILLIAMS: And the other point I would make is you know sort of picking up on your point a little bit, Maria. The only countries that execute more people worldwide than the United States are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Egypt.

CARDONA: Yes. WILLIAMS: This is not --

CARDONA: We don't want to be in that company.

WILLIAMS: -- company that we should be in the United States. I don't want to get into looking down our American noses at the rest of the world. But this is just simply not our peer nations. And if we wish to be taken seriously on a global stage with the kind of countries that we want to be partners with, this is just not the way we ought to be operating.

CARDONA: Right.

PHILLIP: All right, everyone, hold on. Interesting discussion there. Coming up next, in the wake of a brutal murder on New York City's subway, critics are wondering if the Democrats are tone-deaf when it comes to crime in the United States. We're going to discuss that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:46:20]

PHILLIP: Tonight, a new case that you're going to hear a lot about. In 2024, we listened to Donald Trump and MAGA allies talk about Lakin Riley, the Georgian nursing student who was murdered by an undocumented immigrant. Now, we have this case, a heinous act on a New York City subway.

A Guatemalan immigrant who entered the country illegally, setting a bystander on fire. That entire thing caught on surveillance footage and it happened in the early morning around 7:30 A.M. on a Brooklyn- bound F train. It's a black mark for the city for sure which makes this appear all the more out of touch. This is the New York City governor -- or the New York governor tweeting just hours later about improved safety on that same subway system.

This, I mean, timing is one thing. It wasn't just that. It was also, you know, social media videos showing her demonstrating how safe the city was. All of it kind of speaking to -- Mondaire-- this idea that the statistics, the numbers about murders being down, it's not capturing the sense that people have day to day that going about their lives is not as safe as it used to be.

JONES: Yes, yes. Look, I think it's important for any comm staff to make sure that when they've got a scheduled tweet, they take a second look at that and see what else is going on in the day so that doesn't appear out of touch.

We know that overall, crime has been going down in the aggregate but people don't feel safe and we have example after example of things being not as safe as politicians have told especially Democratic politicians have been telling the public.

What happened in New York City is horrifying and the other piece to it that I think is going to play a central role next year in justifying what this incoming administration has described as its program of mass deportations is the fact that the individual who set this woman ablaze is an undocumented migrant. And so, I think you're going to see that used to sort of strengthen public support for this program that incoming President Trump is talking about.

PHILLIP: The suspect is a 33-year-old Guatemalan citizen. He entered unlawfully in June of 2018. He was deported pretty quickly after that but re-entered at some unknown date. We don't -- we don't know yet he's been charged with murder and arson.

This is a city that is also struggling mightily to deal with hundreds of thousands of migrants who are being placed all over the city, being lost track of. I mean, it's a -- it's a crazy situation by all accounts.

GERAGHTY: It is and the mayor is sounding if not quite like a Republican much more hardline and conservative in dealing with illegal immigrants than he did earlier in the last couple years. Obviously --

JONES: He also wants a pardon from --

GERAGHTY: That would help, yes. The mayor -- brought to you by Turkish Airlines. Not every crime is created equal and I think something like this because it's on video. This is going to stick in people's minds for a long time. Peggy Noonan had this very bright column about a year ago. And I think we're all around the same age, old enough to remember the crime wave of New York City in the ' 80s and into the early '90s.

JONES: I was not.

GERAGHTY: Oh, OK. All right, I'm dating myself.

WILLIAMS: I'm writing a book on it.

GERAGHTY: As an old man at this table, let me tell you about the old days, kids. But the idea is like if you stayed out of Central Park at night and you stayed out of certain neighborhoods and you only travel -- there's a sense where you feel like you had a certain amount of control over your -- lessening your chances of being a victim. You hear about some nut job setting somebody on fire and this -- what do you do about that?

[22:50:00]

This woman was homeless but there's a sense of people being shoved onto the subway. This sense that they were dealing with people who are serious mental problems and just very unpredictable in this sense that this -- you don't know where you're safe. You don't know what kind of steps you can take to protect yourself.

PHILLIP: And the subway being kind of Ground Zero for this. You are writing about this very thing.

WILLIAMS: On this very thing. And you know, one of the best things someone said in my reporting was, people don't walk around with aggregated crime stats in their pocket. The mere fact that the homicide rate in New York in 1984 which is -- the events of my book -- were around 2000 and are now just a couple hundred a day.

Doesn't matter if people -- people actually feel scared. And Jim, to your point about not all crimes being created equal, it's not just the fact that it's on video, it's the fact that it's somebody who's unlawfully present in the United States.

And the fact that immigrants and maybe even undocumented folks are probably more likely to be married more -- less likely to commit crimes than the overall population does not change the fact that the idea of people who are unlawfully present -- it's a problem right now, politically, across the country. And --

PHILLIP: And also, just the sheer numbers.

WILLIAMS: The sheer numbers. All of the above. Yes.

PHILLIP: One of the things that the Biden administration, I think, completely failed to even acknowledge is just the scale of all of this. I mean the "Times" wrote in a piece earlier this month, "The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history surpassing the great immigration boom in the late 1800s and early 1900s. You're talking about an average of 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023 net coming to the United States.

CARDONA: Look, I think one of the biggest mistakes that the Biden administration did was not talking about immigration because from the very beginning, they knew what the solution was and the solution was to be strong and smart and strategic on the border and to also have expanded legal pathways to be able to have the undocumented immigrants that have been here for years not the newly arrived but the ones that have been here for years give them ways to be able to be here legally and work legally with work permits.

What happened, I think, they just completely lost control of it and instead of talking about what they wanted to do and frankly what they were doing, they were doing a lot of good things both on enforcement of immigration, as well as, trying to expand those legal pathways. They never wanted to talk about it because they were afraid that Republicans would --

PHILLIP: I think they also --

JONES: Were afraid of the far left, too.

CARDONA: Well, both.

JONES: Yes.

CARDONA: And I think they damned themselves because they didn't talk about the solution.

PHILLIP: I don't think we can sugar coat what happened over the last three years. I mean the statistics don't lie that the numbers -- they did a lot -- they did things, right? But none of them were effective in stopping a historic surge of migration to the United States which had political effects. But they're having practical effects even for --for those migrants.

I mean, many of them have nowhere to go. But you also have services. I mean, the reports are that this woman was homeless. It was freezing in New York when this incident occurred. So, she might have been sleeping on the subway which as a lot of people do.

JONES: And she deserved to be safe, too.

PHILLIP: She deserved to be safe, too. Services in the city are suffering because the city is strained in trying to figure out what to do with just the volume of people here.

JONES: Yes, look, I think, first of all, I think there have been things that the Biden administration has done that have been helpful. It's just that some of those things have been belated. I mean those executive orders this year for example, it begs the question why didn't you do this before this year, before a presidential election year. And there's not -- let's just be honest but there's not a good answer to that.

WILLIAMS: And the post pandemic surge started well before that. This is --

CARDONA: Yes.

WILLIAMS: To your point, Abby, the numbers don't lie. A lot of people came into the United States.

GERAGHTY: Early on in Biden's presidency, he was asked about this and he insisted it was part of a seasonal pattern and it happens every single solitary year. This was like February, March, April of 2021. Well, it wasn't.

The numbers went up and they stayed up and when you have 2.4 million people come in a year, sure, a bunch of them were great folks but they're going to have some bad people in here. You're going to have people have mental issues. You know, people who are members of gangs. You know, people have criminal records.

The American people in this past election said we don't want them here. We want them deported. And you know, if you -- if the Trump administration rolls out and the first thing they take out is Manuel the busboy and who's this good person, hard-working guy who's got a family and also, their people will turn against it. But if it's the drug dealers and gang members, Americans want them out.

PHILLIP: We got to go. Everyone, thank you very much. Great discussion but we got to go. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:59:03]

PHILLIP: Luther Vandross was the king of love songs and now, a new CNN film gives whole new perspective back into the influential artists. Using a wealth of archives, Luther tells his own story supported by the voices of his closest musical collaborators and friends. Here is a preview.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DENZEL WASHINGTON, ACTOR AND DIRECTOR: Mr. Luther Vandross.

(LUTHER VANDROSS PERFORMING)

DIONNE WARWICK, SINGER AND ACTRESS: I remember hearing "A House Is Not A Home" the first time. I -- I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I told him, I said, baby doll, you have just given me the definitive version of that song.

[23:00:00]

(LUTHER VANDROSS PERFORMING)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Tune in the all-new CNN film, "Luther Never Too Much" premieres New Year's Day at 8 P.M. Eastern and Pacific right here on CNN. And thank you very much for watching "NewsNight". CNN's coverage continues right now.