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Special Counsel Zeroes In On Chaotic Oval Office Meeting; Officials: U.S. To Send Cluster Munitions To Ukraine; U.S. Job Market Cooled Off In June, Adding Just 209K Jobs. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired July 07, 2023 - 11:00   ET

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

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[11:01:53]

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: It was one of the most chaotic meetings in the Oval Office has ever seen. And now CNN has learned the special counsel's prosecutors are questioning witnesses who were in the room where it happened.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: A weapon that is banned in more than 100 countries will soon be used on the battlefield in Ukraine by the Ukrainians. How Ukraine hopes cluster munitions from the United States will help them break through Russia's frontlines.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: And scanning for sharks after a rise in encounters, one coastal community is rolling out new technology to try to keep people safe on the beach. I'm Kate Bolduan with John Berman and Sara Sidner. This is CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

SIDNER: There are new developments in the Justice Department's criminal investigation into Donald Trump's actions after losing the 2020 presidential election. Multiple sources tell CNN Jack Smith is now zeroing in on a December 2020 meeting that turned into a screaming match between Trump's advisers and the White House counsel. During that meeting, depicted here in a House Committee exhibit, outside advisors pushed Donald Trump to consider some desperate proposals to keep him in power.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PAT CIPOLLONE, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: I was not happy to see the people in the Oval Office. I don't think any of these people were providing the President with good advice.

DEREK LYONS, FORMER TRUMP ATTORNEY: I mean, at times there were people shouting at each other, throwing insults at each other.

SIDNEY POWELL, FORMER TRUMP ATTORNEY: Cipollone and Herschmann and whoever the other guy was showed nothing but contempt and disdain of the President.

ERIC HERSCHMANN, FORMER TRUMP ATTORNEY: I think that it got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there. RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER TRUMP ATTORNEY: I'm going to categorically describe it as you guys are not tough enough. Or maybe I put it another way, you're a bunch --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: It's hard to forget those depositions from the January 6th Committee. All right, prosecutors are focusing on three outside Trump advisers who were involved in that meeting former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, one time National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. CNN's Zachary Cohen now joins us. Zachary, by all accounts, this was a truly chaotic meeting. What are investigators, though, hoping to learn from speaking to these three people?

ZACHARY COHEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: Yes, Sara. Sources are telling me and my colleagues that prosecutors have really demonstrated a consistent and even recent interest in this December 18th, 2020 Oval Office meeting, where Trump effectively looked on as there was a showdown that took place between his White House counsel and this group of outside advisers who were pushing things like executive orders to have the military or the Department of Homeland Security seize voting machines, all in a bid to find or produce that evidence of widespread voter fraud that, at that time, was really the key to the future efforts to overturn in the 2020 election.

[11:05:05]

The House January 6th Committee really marks this meeting as a moment where Trump chose not to listen to his own lawyers, his White House attorneys, who were saying, look, you've already lost. There is no widespread fraud. You've lost the election. And he chose the path of listening to those outside advisors who were saying, continue to push the conspiracy theories about fraud. Continue to insist that the election was rigged. And so, really, a moment in time that is significant, as painted by the January 6th Committee. And it appears prosecutors are also interested in determining what went on in the Oval Office that day.

SIDNER: Well, this is also happening as the Arizona Secretary of State says that his office is complying with a subpoena as part of Jack Smith's investigation. What could prosecutors learn there?

COHEN: Yes, prosecutors are asking or demanding documents related to two lawsuits that were filed after the 2020 election, one that was filed by the Trump campaign and another that was filed by the Republican Party chairwoman at the time, Kelly Ward. And these lawsuits effectively claimed that the election was tainted by widespread fraud, when in reality, there was no evidence to support that claim itself. So the queer prosecutors are also looking at the effort to put forward lawsuits based on baseless claims of voter fraud and the lawyers and the Republican state officials who helped do it.

SIDNER: All right, Zachary Cohen, thank you so much. John?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ADRIAN FONTS (D), ARIZONA SECRETARY OF STATE: It was just another one of the random, various, and ascendry frivolous lawsuits that were filed all over the United States of America in the feeble and misguided attempt to overturn an American election. I think the crux of what is being sought here is the same as what we're seeing across the United States of America. Was there interference? Was there attempted interference? Does it amount to a conspiracy across the country to overturn an election? I mean, all these themes are consistent, and what we're seeing here in Arizona is not inconsistent with what happened across the rest of the country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COHEN: So you just heard from the Arizona Secretary of State who complied with the subpoena, and he's describing what he believes the subpoena for documents to his office meant. It reflects an interest in this potential multistate coordinated and potentially criminal effort to overturn the election, specifically by targeting seven states where Trump lost and trying to overturn the results there.

SIDNER: All right, Zachary Cohen, thank you so much for that reporting. John?

BERMAN: All right, with us now, CNN senior legal analyst and former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Elie Honig. Counselor, the details of this Oval Office meeting are dramatic. They are outrageous. What, though, might be the possible criminality in there?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, really important to know. The fact that something is dramatic and outrageous does not necessarily mean that it's criminal. And undoubtedly, this meeting in the White House was dramatic, outrageous, bananas. Choose your word here. Here's what prosecutors would have to show in order to charge this as a crime.

First of all, that any of the people in the room, especially the lawyers, understood that the plans of action that they were offering were not legal, were not constitutional, and they knew that in good faith. And second of all, you'd have to show that the objective here, what they were trying to do, was something illegal. So that could be a couple of things.

One, if they're trying to block or delay the counting of the electoral votes by Congress, that would do it. And second of all, more broadly, if they're trying to defraud the United States of a free and fair election, then that would be criminal. So just being in this meeting isn't necessarily incriminating. And you have to show more than just, there was a heated crazy dispute.

BERMAN: Is just talking about illegal stuff criminal? Or what would make talking about it criminal?

HONIG: It can be. If -- let's just not names. But if there's an attorney in that room who in their head knows this plan to pressure the Vice President is unconstitutional and illegal, but I'm going to advocate for it anyway. And the reason we're going to do it is because we're trying to steal the election, then, yes, offering that up verbally in the room would be criminal. But proving that is not easy, because you have to get inside the head of people. You can ask your jury to draw reasonable inferences. They don't have to admit, I know this is wrong, but it's not a clear cut case necessarily based on that meeting alone.

BERMAN: All right, give me both sides of it, then. Let's talk about it in terms of Donald Trump then, in terms of suggesting criminality for him there what might lean toward that and what would argue against it.

HONIG: If Donald Trump were to be charged for something based on that meeting that Donald Trump actually did what, let's say, John Eastman was suggesting pressured Mike Pence or asked Mike Pence to throw away votes? Here's what Donald Trump's defense will be. He will say, here I am. I'm in a room full of lawyers. Some of them are telling me this is legitimate, some of them Pat Cipollone and others are telling me, no, that's crazy. You can't do that. Well, I'm just a civilian. He's the president, but he's not a lawyer.

And he will say, I am entitled to follow the advice of lawyer A, B and C and not D, E and F, and you can't charge me with a crime as a result of that.

BERMAN: In order to make it criminal, though, prosecutors would have to say, no, you knew pressuring Mike Pence was illegal, yet you did it anyway. Way what kind of evidence would they need to be able to prove in their minds that Trump knew?

[11:10:05]

HONIG: Right. So, remember, during the January 6th Committee hearings when there was a parade of witnesses, Bill Barr, Ivanka Trump, Pat Cipollone and many others who said, we talked to him, we explained to him this was wrong. And a few even said he acknowledged, he knew that he lost the election. Those are very important pieces of testimony. So if you can piece that together and make the same showing as to Donald Trump that he knew that this was illegal, he was somehow conspiring or collaborating with some of the lawyers in the room and he had an illegal objective, then you can charge a crime.

But as you can see, John, I think the point of this is not cut and dry. This is not black and white. You can't just point to that meeting and go, oh my goodness, I can't believe the chaos. Who are we charging with crimes? It's more specific than that.

BERMAN: We are getting some terrific reporting, and a lot of it coming from our own CNN teams about the details of the January 6th special counsel investigation. And I think people look at that and say, hey, there's new stuff coming out. Maybe this means the special counsel is close to pressing charges. Well, remember, something similar happened with the Mar-a-Lago documents case there, but in that, we knew that Trump's lawyers had met with the special counsel about that. Are there any specific actions we're seeing now that say, hey, maybe they are close oppressing charges? HONIG: That's a really important contrast, because when we saw that meeting happened, Donald Trump's lawyers had been given the chance and had gone in and met with prosecutors on Mar-a-Lago. I can tell you from my experience, that is end game type of stuff. Now, that doesn't always necessarily happen. Perhaps they wrap both topics into that meeting back a month or so ago. But we've not seen to me what I would consider a red flag of this is about to happen. It could be, but Jack Smith has run a tight ship. But I will say this. If I were to make a checklist of all the things I needed to do as a prosecutor here, all the witnesses I needed to speak to, all the subpoenas I needed to serve, to me, they've pretty much checked every item on that list. So in my estimation here and again, we're trying to sort of read into a black box, they have to be right at or right near the moment of decision.

BERMAN: I don't think we know that Trump or anyone for that matter, because there were other charges to other people that could come. Also, we don't know that anyone's been identified or told they're a target yet either.

HONIG: Exactly.

BERMAN: All right, Elie Honig, great to see you. Thank you so much. Kate?

BOLDUAN: Also new this morning, the Biden administration is set to unveil a new military aid package for Ukraine. And for the first time, it's expected to include a controversial weapon banned by most countries. We're talking about cluster munitions, and they're canisters, that when -- that carry dozens, even hundreds of smaller bombs or submunitions that then scatter along a wide area of a target. The U.S. no longer uses them, but the government has a stockpile, and Ukraine has been requesting the help as part of their counter offensive against Russian forces. CNN's Jim Sciutto has more on this, he's joining us now. It's good to see you, Jim. So Ukraine has been requesting these bombs to help them on the battlefield. Talk us through the functions of cluster munitions first.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yes, let's be direct here. It's a devastating weapon, and it's anti- personnel weapon, which means it's designed to kill soldiers on the battlefield. That's really part of the intention here. And the U.S. and its partners would not be sending this weapon to Ukraine if they didn't believe there was a need for it. Perfectly reasonable debate as to whether that need counteracts the other dangers. But they believe there's a need.

And the reason they believe there's a need, Kate, is because the Russians are so well dug in to these defensive positions in eastern Ukraine. Multiple lines of trenches, minefields, and so on. And it's hard to break through those lines. And that's one reason why we've seen slower progress than many Western assessments expected in this Ukrainian counter offensive. So to help Ukraine break those lines, that's what this weapon is about here. It's a devastating weapon. It might be essential to Ukrainian forces as they make these moves, or attempt to, but it raises a lot of other questions, frankly. BOLDUAN: It absolutely does. And the Pentagon is facing tough questions about this. We've heard, you know, we've heard the Pentagon spokesperson kind of fielding those questions. How does the United States mitigate the dangers when we know one of the dangers is we've seen evidence of it, Jim, is that particularly children can face grievous injury years later when they come across these things.

SCIUTTO: Listen, I've done stories in Vietnam and Laos where decades after the war there, bomblets from cluster bombs still turn up, and they kill people, including kids. So the issue here is fail rate really? When that casing opens up, as you showed there, and those bombs come out, how many fail and don't explode and then provide danger, you know, pose a danger down the line? Congress actually passed a law a few years ago that required that any such munitions, the fail rate can only be 1 percent or lower.

The Pentagon's looked at its weapons, and tests in recent years, the fail rate was up to 5, 6, 7 percent. That's a lot. They believe -- they say they believe. Now they've got a way to get this down to maybe 2, 2.5 percent. That's not 1 percent, but it's lower. So they're trying to address those concerns. But the fact is, it kind of comes, you know, that danger comes with this.

[11:15:15]

Now, I've spoken to military commanders, et cetera about this specifically. They say one thing the Ukrainians do, what the Russians don't do with these munitions is Russians drop them and they don't care where they dropped them and they don't do anything about them afterwards. The Ukrainian forces will map where they drop them so that later they can go back and make sure those areas are safe. But in the meantime, big military effect, that's the expectation here. But there is a danger that comes with it.

BOLDUAN: Yes. And it goes without saying, if Ukraine says that they need them, they know they're going to be using them. The understanding is they're going to be using them over their own soil. And the last thing that Ukraine wants is to endanger their own civilians obviously.

SCIUTTO: It's a great point, absolutely great point.

BOLDUAN: It's great to see you, Jim. Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Good to see you.

BOLDUAN: Sara?

SIDNER: Ahead, the U.S. job growth slowed down in June, adding just 209,000 jobs, almost 100,000 fewer than May. What does this mean to you? That's coming up.

Plus, a billionaire battle, Twitter versus Meta. Elon Musk and company now threatening a lawsuit over the launch of Threads. The latest in the social media battle.

And an inside look at a camp in Belarus where Wagner fighters could live if they were to take an offer up from the country's president to move to Belarus. We'll take you there.

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[11:21:07]

BOLDUAN: A new report out on the U.S. economy, 209,000 jobs added to the economy in June, lower than expected, but still we spoke to the Acting Labor Secretary about all of this last hour. Here is how she described it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JULIE SU, ACTING SECRETARY OF LABOR: It's stable, it's strong, you know, combined with the 3.6 unemployment rate, which you've already noted, this is an unemployment rate, 3.6 percent unemployment. The predictions were that it would not fall below 4 percent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: CNN economics and political commentator, Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell is here with me now to talk more about this. So, Catherine, you heard with the Acting Labor Secretary how she described it right there. What do you see in this report? How do you describe it?

CATHERINE RAMPELL, CNN ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It was a slowdown but still a relatively solid report. For context, job growth in the 200,000 range is actually quite good by historical standards. It's not as high as it was in the last couple of years when we've had these gangbuster reports one after another coming out of the pandemic. But it's higher than the average monthly job growth rate that we had, for example, in the 10 years preceding the pandemic.

So, you know, it's a solid report. It's still a relatively warm economy, if not a really hot economy, and I see nothing in it that suggests that the Fed is going to take its foot off the brake at this point.

BOLDUAN: We're showing on the wall next to you some of the areas that saw job gains industries, construction, healthcare, government, all seeing some jumps. One thing that I find interesting, not sure what to make of it, is labor force participation rate for women, especially in the prime working age, it hit an all-time high in June, reaching 77.8 percent. What do you see with that?

RAMPELL: I think this is a really unsung story of this recovery. You may recall that during the recession we heard a lot of talk of the so called she session, right, that women were disproportionately losing their jobs because of the sectors that they worked in, as well as the fact that disruptions in childcare and schooling disproportionately affected mothers. And there were fears at the time, I expressed them myself that working women might be set back a generation as a result of these kinds of disruptions that we saw in 2020.

And yet somehow, American working women have emerged stronger than ever before, at least financially, coming out of this pandemic, and it's not exactly clear why. I think it's some combination of a more highly educated workforce and women with college degrees are more likely to be working than those without college degrees. And we see a shift in the demographics there.

It's also the rise of remote work, I think, which, again, disproportionately benefits people with college degrees. Whatever the possible explanation behind this, I think this is actually a great story to celebrate. Women are more than punching above their weight in terms of holding jobs and applying for jobs. Men, on the other hand, a different story. They still haven't recovered the ground lost early in the pandemic. But women are doing quite well in the labor market.

BOLDUAN: All right, we know that the Federal Reserve will have their next meeting late this month, and what all of this adds up to mean for them, we will have much more time to speak about that. Thanks, Catherine. It's good to see you. John?

[11:24:39]

BERMAN: All right swiper, no swiping. Mike Pence with a not so veiled swipe at Donald Trump just before Trump is due to arrive in Iowa.

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SIDNER: New this morning, several eastern European countries are warning NATO about the threat posed now by Belarus. In a letter, the presidents of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia say the cooperation between Russia and Belarus has deteriorated the security of the region and that of the entire Euro-Atlantic area. The warning comes as a Belarusian government says plans to host Wagner mercenary troops in the country are now on hold.

[11:30:01]

This is after, of course, President Lukashenko flip flopped on the whereabouts of Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.