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Trump Says, Received Letter Stating I'm Target of Jan. 6 Probe. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired July 18, 2023 - 10:00   ET

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

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JOHN BERMAN: CNN ANCHOR: All right. The breaking news this morning, former President Trump says he has been informed by Special Counsel Jack Smith that he, Trump, is a target in the criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: All of this is potentially a major signal that prosecutors could once again file criminal charges against former President Donald Trump. And if that happens, Donald Trump would be the first and only former president to be criminally indicted now, three times.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Our reporters, correspondents and guests are standing by with the very latest on all this.

Let's begin this hour with CNN Senior Crime and Justice Reporter Katelyn Polantz, who helped break this news for us. What exactly did Trump say? He has posted on social media, as he often does. What was his statement?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, he's saying quite explicitly that the Justice Department told him that charges may be near for him in the January 6 investigation. So, this is the investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Jack Smith. It has looked at Donald Trump very much so about what he did in the White House, what he did after the 2020 election, as well as others. It has also looked at the behavior of others and brought in many, many witnesses here.

And at this time, that investigation appears to be so ripe that the Justice Department has been able to tell Donald Trump that the time is now. If you want to speak to the grand jury in your own defense, that is something that they allow people who are targets of an investigation to do. But it's often something that only happens at the very end of an investigation, where the charging decision is so close that an indictment could come in days, if not weeks.

And so what Trump is saying here specifically is that the Justice Department sent a letter on Sunday night of this week stating that he is the target of the January 6 grand jury investigation. That's a federal investigation, we understand, is based out of Washington, D.C. And it is giving him a very short, in his words, four days to report to the grand jury if he so chooses. And then he identifies that it means that he may be arrested and indicted.

He also did receive a target letter very similar to this in the investigation by the Special Counsel's office in Florida, in Miami, where he ultimately was charged with several counts, more than 30 counts, related to his retention of classified records after he left the presidency.

But this investigation, it is about what Trump was doing at the end of the presidency, trying to hold on to power and leading up to and on that day of the January 6 riot of the Capitol, when many of his supporters went to the Capitol and wanted to potentially harm Mike Pence, members of Congress, and block the transfer of power of the presidency from Trump to Biden.

BOLDUAN: Katelyn Polantz, stick with us, please. And we're going to also bring in Paula Reid. Paula, you're getting some more information from Rudy Giuliani's team. He obviously is someone who, along with Donald Trump, as we've long known, could be potentially a focus of this investigation. What are you hearing from them?

PAULA REID, CNN SENIOR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Okay, the first question after hearing on social media that Trump had received a target letter was, well, who else might have received this kind of letter, and, look, the former mayor of New York, he is at the top of the list. He was at the center of former President Trump's efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election results, including a pressure on state officials filing various lawsuits. He was front and center throughout that entire effort.

So, I gave his lawyer a call, but he tells me that Rudy Giuliani has not received a target letter in this investigation, and his lawyer does not expect that he will be receiving a target letter or being charged in this probe.

Now, he went on to explain, as we've previously reported, we know in recent weeks, Rudy Giuliani sat down with special counsel investigators, but his lawyer revealed that he actually was offered. The special counsel said, look, you can come in for a voluntary interview or you can get a grand jury subpoena.

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Now, Rudy opted for the voluntary interview, and we're told that he spoke with investigators over the course of two mornings, over two days. He taped his radio show in the afternoon, which is why they asked for that accommodation.

I also learned that investigators went to Rudy in New York to conduct this interview. I'm told that throughout the interview, Rudy Giuliani was cooperative, sharing information with investigators, though, he did assert privilege. It's unclear if it was attorney/client privilege or executive privilege to several of the questions.

But at this point, his lawyer insists he has been cooperative. He sat for that voluntary interview, and his lawyer at this point does not expect that he will be charged. BOLDUAN: Paula, thank you so much for that. Much more coming out of Florida as we speak, I'm sure.

BERMAN: All right, all of us are on our computers, working as many sources as we can to find out as much information as we can. We apologize for the disarray, but this is what happened when there is breaking news of this caliber, the news that Donald Trump says he has received a target letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith indicating he is a target in the January 6 investigation.

Now, this is separate from the Mar-a-Lago documents case, for which he has already been indicted. This is major, major development. This is a whole separate area that the special counsel has been looking into. And to be clear now, CNN has confirmed that Donald Trump has been identified that he is a target of this investigation. We no longer merely need to say that Donald Trump is claiming on his social media account, Donald Trump has received a letter saying he is a target in the January 6 investigation.

Let's bring in our Legal Analyst Elie Honig now. Okay, Elie, what does that mean? What does that now do in terms of the clock and in terms of what we expect to see in the coming days?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: So a target is the second worst thing you can be in the federal system only to a defendant, which is the worst. DOJ can and often does send target letters. They don't have to, but we know that Jack Smith does this because he did it with the first case, the Mar-a-Lago case. A target is defined under Justice Department rules and regulations as somebody who's likely to be indicted, somebody who prosecutors think they have substantial evidence linking that person to a crime.

The reason you send a target letter is to give the person fair notice so the person is aware, so the person, perhaps, as in this case, has a chance to testify in the grand jury if they'd like to, so they can go get a lawyer if they don't have one, so they can be protective of their own rights against self-incrimination.

And as to the sort of bottom line, practical impact of this, it is very likely that a person who receives a target letter, very likely -- not certain, but very likely that that person ends up getting charged.

BERMAN: Can I just tell people they see in the screen, Trump told I have four days to report to the grand jury? That's a matter of form. The target almost never goes and testifies before the grand jury. That's not the most important thing here. The most important thing is Donald Trump has received a letter saying he is a target in the January 6 investigation.

SIDNER: And now it's been confirmed that actually did happen. This isn't just him saying it. It's been confirmed he has received this letter.

Can I ask you quickly, what could the charges be here? And I know you're -- we know this is a huge investigation. They've talked to all manner of people, from Giuliani to electors. What potential charges could he be facing?

HONIG: So, the broadest charge here would be a conspiracy to defraud the United States of a free and fair election. That could, depending how broadly prosecutors construe it, cover all of the conduct that we've heard about, the pressure campaigns on state and local legislators and officials, the fake electors scheme, the pressure on Mike Pence, and sort of gobble up everything that we know about.

Another potential charge here is obstruction of an official proceeding, the attempts to block Congress from counting the electoral votes. You also could see perhaps in a more discreet, straightforward manner, false statements, charges, if they can tie Donald Trump into the submission of those false electoral certificate.

BOLDUAN: Which is the hardest charge?

HONIG: The hardest charge?

BOLDUAN: Yes.

HONIG: Well, the conspiracy charge is the broadest charge. So, there's the most to it in a way that's an advantage for prosecutors because you can pour in all the evidence. But it's also the broadest. And usually narrower charges are easier to explain to a grand jury. So, I think you say false statements, for example, look, ladies and gentlemen of the jury or grand jury, here is documents, they have false statements on them, they were sent into the Archives. That's the crime. That's easier to explain. The conspiracy takes more time, more effort, but it gives you more leeway to argue your case.

BOLDUAN: That's super interesting. Stick with us, Elie.

Let's bring in CNN's Abby Phillip. She's joining us now for a little more look at to join this conversation as we're covering this breaking news.

So, Abby, we now have from two sources familiar with the matter that CNN has confirmed that Donald Trump has received this letter from the special counsel saying he is a target of this criminal investigation. It's already been a swirling question of what the other criminal charges he's facing means for the future of his campaign.

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But what would this addition now mean to the near future for his campaign?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. I think this is a moment where we have to take a step back and think about the fact that this is a former president who has already been impeached related to conduct that was under investigation by the special counsel.

That impeachment did not result in a conviction and a removal from office in the waning days of his presidency but it did raise so many questions about what his role was in this insurrection on the Capitol to try to stop the transfer of power to Joe Biden. And the idea now that he has received a target letter from the special counsel saying that he is basically likely to be indicted on charges related to that same conduct is really extraordinary. And to some degree, this case is different from all the others in that it has pretty direct bearing on the operation of this government on the United States of America and he's now a candidate for the presidency.

There are political questions, I think, right now about the near future and how voters will see this, whether it's Republican voters or voters in the general election. But on the question of a sitting candidate being potentially indicted for actions that he may have allegedly took to undermine the peaceful transfer of government in this country, that would be completely unprecedented. And I think it really puts Trump in a very different category in all of American history, frankly.

This is, I think, a big moment for him. And it's going to be harder, I think, to explain this away as something that is just about a few sheets of paper. This is about a real seminal moment for this country. And if he, in fact, faces charges here, I think this really could overshadow everything else, even, frankly, all the other charges that he might face here, perhaps maybe not the Georgia case, which is very much related to the January 6 allegations here.

BERMAN: Abby, it's a side issue, but only a little bit of a side issue. Underneath you, there's a very small picture of Ron DeSantis, who is running against Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Ron DeSantis is going to be on CNN at 4:00 today. And I just can't help but think how this news shakes up once again this Republican primary and the various questions that will now be put to these other Republican candidates. Do they choose to defend Donald Trump? Do they choose to speak out against possible charges of undermining democracy?

PHILLIP: That is the big question. And up until this point, the answer has been no. They have chosen not to take any of these issues, legal issues that Trump faces, up and use it against him.

And I'm not sure that we can expect that to really change, because in many ways, January 6th among Republicans has become just part of the firmament here. It's part of the party ideology, especially on the far right, where you sort of downplay what happened on January 6th. You call the investigations and the impeachment basically a witch hunt.

Ron DeSantis recently was asked about this by a voter in New Hampshire, and he said, well, I had nothing to do with it, but I basically think we need to move on.

And that's, I think, how we have seen candidates in the past respond to it. Right now, for DeSantis, the reason that this interview that he has this afternoon with Jake is so significant is because he is pivoting in his campaign tactically.

And the question now will be whether he will pivot on the substance, changing his approach to criticizing Trump and using some of the many legal problems that Trump faces as part of his campaign against him, because right now, DeSantis has stagnated and he's looking to do something to change the trajectory of his own campaign.

BERMAN: Yes. Ron DeSantis has a Ron DeSantis problem, in addition to now a Donald Trump problem.

BOLDUAN: To your point, it's really interesting because a lot of the candidates have been saying, we're done looking back. We need to look forward in doing that in order to differentiate themselves from Donald Trump who has been looking back. They're going to all forced to now look back if criminal charges come related to trying to -- related to January 6th.

BERMAN: Absolutely.

SIDNER: He still says that he did win 2020 election. He's still putting that out there. So, they have to both look forward and backwards right now. Everyone's going to know what their response is, though, the polls have showed that Donald Trump has not been hurt by the first indictment.

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BERMAN: Or the second.

SIDNER: Or the second.

BERMAN: Or whatever.

SIDNER: Or any of them, right? His core supporters have gotten more supportive, not less. So, we'll have to see what this one does.

Let's go now to our Senior Justice Correspondent Evan Perez, who is in Washington for us. We're talking about this, Donald Trump, of course, at the center of all this. He still denies that he lost the 2020 election. But who else could investigators be looking at potentially targeting here?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Sara, that's a great question, because the fact is that this was not done just by Donald Trump. He had a number of people who were working with him to try to overturn the election results in the states that he lost.

And some of that pressure campaign, it came directly from people inside the White House, Mark Meadows, for instance. We know that Rudy Giuliani and some of the other attorneys were pressuring election officials, trying to get access to voting machines, which is, by the way, against federal law. It is against state law and is also against federal law if you don't have authorization to get access to those voting machines. That's something we know that there was an effort to do.

We know that election officers in all seven states were this fake elector scheme, the scheme to try to seat electors to try to keep Donald Trump in power even though he had lost those states, all those seven states, top election officials have now spoken to the special counsel. So, one of the names we've obviously at the top of the list is Rudy Giuliani. His lawyers have told our Paula Reid that he has not received a target letter. He went into the grand jury just recently, spent two days answering questions. We're told that he did not answer questions around Trump because he claimed some kind of privilege. But what it tells us is that prosecutors have been trying to figure out exactly what Rudy Giuliani's role was in all of this.

And we know that John Eastman, we know that Jeffrey Clark, some of those other folks, legal folks, have also been at the center of this investigation. So, the question now, we're making calls to all of these folks to figure out whether they've similarly received target letters.

One of the big questions at the center of all this, Sara, is the issue of whether the prosecutors would go after those officials and not Trump himself. Clearly, the answer is they're starting at the top. And so we'll see whether there is anybody else around him who has also received these types of letters.

SIDNER: And as our Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig, who's with us here, has said, those could come later in days or not at all. We will just have to wait and see.

Thank you so much, Evan Perez, our senior justice correspondent there, with more details on who also may continue to be investigated going forward.

BOLDUAN: Let's go to Capitol Hill right now. Manu Raju is standing by. Some of the first reaction coming in, Manu, of Republicans in what they think hearing now that Donald Trump, the former president, is the target of this January 6th criminal investigation.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And what we have seen in time and again is Republicans rushing to Donald Trump's defense even as he faces serious legal problems, even after his first two criminal indictments, and now being apparently the target of a third potential criminal indictment, this time no different.

Republicans also offering a staunch defense of the former president, attacking the special counsel, Jack Smith, and also attacking the Justice Department over this probe. This has been -- even as we have not seen any evidence, we have not seen any statement, we don't know the exact findings of this investigation, there's still argument from the Republicans that Trump is being unfairly targeted.

This is what the speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, just told Republicans. He said, I guess under a Biden administration by America, you'd expect this. He said if you notice this, he said, President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing Biden for re- election.

He went on to contend, this is the weaponizing of the Justice Department. This has been, of course, part of a Republican theme all along, one aspect of their investigations. But, again, no one has seen the evidence. No one has any exact idea about what, if anything, Donald Trump may be charged with in this investigation.

But I talked to a number of other rank and file Republicans coming out of a conference meeting just now. Most of them did not know this news. They were in a meeting. I informed them of it. Many of them did not want to comment on that.

But several of them did indicate that even if Trump were indicted for a third time, they would still support him for the presidency, even arguing, many of them did, that it would not hurt him in a general election, believing that it would actually bolster his chances among Republican voters. How that would actually play in a general election is a completely different question here.

But what we have seen, the House Republicans making clear that they're supporting Trump through all of this, even if he faces an unprecedented third indictment of a former president. Guys?

BOLDUAN: Manu thank you so much. I'm going to be hearing much more from Capitol Hill on this.

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That's the political side of it. But there's also very present right now, now is the legal side of it.

BERMAN: And, Elie Honig, our senior legal analyst, I want to come back to you just to remind people of where we're talking about here, so much of our focus has been on Florida. And, by the way, Judge Aileen, Canada, federal judge there, is holding a crucial hearing in the Mar-a-Lago documents case in just a few hours. That's Florida. This investigation is D.C.-focused?

HONIG: Yes. So, all the grand jury action has been in Washington, D.C. I think it is overwhelmingly likely that if there's an indictment, it will be filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C.

And here's why that's really important. Donald Trump is very politically unpopular in Washington, D.C. He got about 5 percent of the vote in 2020 in D.C. So, the jury pool is going to look very different for him in D.C. If he is indicted, then it will in Florida.

BERMAN: And just one more point comparing these two cases, in Florida, so much of will there be a delay, will this trial last forever, has to do with there being classified documents which complicates things. As far as we know, there isn't no classified documents involved in the January 6th case.

HONIG: That's correct. I think on the other side, this is now, if there's an indictment, it will be the third in line. They don't necessarily have to be tried in the same order that they're indicted. Each judge is going to have to pick his or her own schedule. But we're really heading for a sort of gridlock here with these trials. When are they going to try these cases if they expect to get them all in before the election? And that's another dimension to watch for at 2:00 today when Trump goes into Florida court. Well, not Donald Trump himself, but his lawyers go into Florida court and potentially get a trial date set there.

SIDNER: Can we just step back for a minute and recognize what's happening today? This target letter that was sent to Donald, we now know he has said it. Now we have it confirmed that it actually happened. This is not surprising, but it is historic, correct? I mean, it isn't all that surprising. Can we be honest here that we have been watching this one by one by one, all of the people that have been interviewed? It all kind of points back to Donald Trump, but it is a huge moment in our history as well.

HONIG: It's really a momentous occasion because it tells us that very likely, again, not certainly, but very, very likely, Donald Trump will find himself on the end of a federal indictment that relates to the effort to steal the 2020 election.

And I think that fact does differentiate it from, let's say, the two charges that we've seen already. The state charge here in New York, the Manhattan D.A., relates to the way that hush money payments were logged that Donald Trump made to porn stars seven years ago.

The other DOJ case, Mar-a-Lago, that relates to very important, but his handling of classified or mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice.

But this relates to the heart of our democracy. The allegation, if we see charges here will be that Donald Trump essentially tried to steal the 2020 election. Yes. And that's a very big deal. Will it make a political impact? I'll leave that to Manu and the others that he's covering.

BOLDUAN: Elie, does it make a statement at all, from your perspective, that we could be seeing charges coming in both of the special counsel investigations, kind of as if all of it's kind of wrapping up at this point? We obviously had the charges in Florida, and this has been kind of the lingering special counsel investigation. What does that say kind of where they are now?

HONIG: So, a couple of things. First of all, I think Jack Smith clearly has worked very hard, very directed and focused since he took office. He became special counsel in November. And he charged the Mar- a-Lago case last month in June. So, that took him about eight months. And now here we are into July, and it looks like he's probably very likely getting ready to charge another case.

But Jack Smith has made a huge difference since he took over. When Merrick Garland was running this investigation, there was no indication that the top most powerful people were being interviewed or looked at. That changed very quickly when Jack Smith took over.

And let me throw one more timing issue into the mix here. Remember, there's yet another investigation pending by the Fulton County, Georgia district attorney relating to Donald Trump's pressure campaign there. And so --

BOLDUAN: And the general view is maybe kind of August-ish.

HONIG: Well, she has said she has sent public letters asking judges to consider working from home and not holding trials, wink, wink, in the first few weeks of August.

So, who's going to get there first? It seemed perhaps, look, if I'm in Jack Smith's shoes and I think I have a charge, I absolutely want to bring it before the D.A., before Fani Willis.

BOLDUAN: Why?

HONIG: Because you want to get there first. You want to have first priority. You want to be able to say to a judge, hey, we charged first, we should get to try it first. The judge doesn't have to listen to that. You want to get to the witnesses first.

And I think if Jack Smith does charge this, Fani Willis, the D.A., needs to consider, does it make sense for me to charge something that's already covered by DOJ? I think she's made quite clear she intends to charge but yet another --

SIDNER: Is there any coordination there? They don't speak to each other, but they do notice when the next person puts out an indictment.

HONIG: Right. They're all watching each other. That, I think, is safe to say. We've not seen any evidence or reporting that any of the relevant prosecutors here, whether Alvin Bragg, the D.A. in Manhattan, Fani Willis, the D.A. in Fulton County, Jack Smith, we've seen no evidence that they've coordinated.

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You can, by the way. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the prosecutor from one office picking up the phone, calling another one, saying, hey, how are we going to work this out, but there's no evidence that they've done that here.

BERMAN: Possible defenses from Donald Trump. Again, we don't know what charges he could face here. We now know he's a target of a federal investigation surrounding January 6. So, you know, broadly speaking, the universe of possible charges here, how could he defend himself against that?

HONIG: So, of course, we have to actually see the charges. But note, having a sense of what the universe is, I think the defense will be some combination of I genuinely believed or enough people had told me that I won the election and I was pursuing my remedies to try to address that problems with that defense. But that will be one.

We also need to watch for what we call an advice of counsel defense, meaning my lawyers told me that I could do these things. For example, John Eastman, a lawyer who's now, I think, been widely discredited, but at the time a known constitutional scholar who'd clerked on the Supreme Court, my lawyers told me that Mike Pence had the authority, for example, to throw out electoral votes. And I'm entitled to act on that advice of counsel. If you can establish that and that the advice was not utterly unreasonable, that can be a defense to certain charges, to certain portions of the case.

So, I think it'll be a combination of I was contesting this election, maybe in an aggressive way, but not criminally. I'm voicing Donald Trump's defense here, again, to be clear. And/or I was told by my advisors and attorneys that this was legitimate for me to do.

BOLDUAN: Elie, stand by for us. We're going to have much more coming up on this breaking news, two sources confirming that Donald Trump has received a letter from the special counsel, Jack Smith, informing him he is the target of a criminal investigation in to January 6th, that on this very same day that Donald Trump's legal team is to be in court in Florida, in first hearing before Judge Aileen Cannon over the charges he faces related to classified documents. We have much more on this. Stay with us.

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