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Jack Smith Brief Lays Out Trump's Private Criminal Conduct on January 6; Country Music Star Garth Brooks Accused of Sexual Assault; Trump Joins Georgia Gov. Kemp for First Appearance Since 2020 Rift. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired October 04, 2024 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

SANCHEZ: The majority of this activity is happening in battleground states, so that tells you a lot.

ZACH COHEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: Absolutely, the key states that will determine who the president is.

SANCHEZ: Yes, Zach Cohen, thank you so much for that.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's stunning filing this week is being called election interference and a hit job by the Trump campaign.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: It's also getting some criticism from legal scholars, like CNN's Senior Legal Analyst, Elie Honig, who joins us now. Ellie, you wrote an article for New York Magazine's Intelligencer, where you called Jack Smith's filing a quote, cheap shot. How is it a cheap shot?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: So Alisyn, the Justice Department has long had a written policy that says federal prosecutors shall take no action that may impact an election, too close to an election unless you cannot humanly avoid it. And what Jack Smith has done here is filed a 165 page opus that includes information that, first of all, has not been tested through the rules of evidence that Jack Smith actually concedes. Some of this would never be admissible at trial.

It includes all evidence that has never been subjected to or tested by cross examination. But what happened here that's really unusual, Alisyn, is the way that Jack Smith and to an extent Judge Chutkan manipulated and twisted the ordinary procedure. Ordinarily, a defendant makes a motion first to dismiss a case or to do any other type of thing. And then the prosecutor responds.

But here, Jack Smith said, first of all, Judge, I want to file a brief that's four times the normal maximum instead of the normal 45 pages. I want 180. And second of all, I need to go first. Judge Chutkan even said that's an unusual request. But then she granted it.

So I don't think that Jack Smith's conduct here has been consistent with DOJ's policy. SANCHEZ: Elie, when it comes to DOJ's policy, the action portion of what you're talking about, not a new prosecution, but action that could impact the election, I understood to be within 30 days of an election. We were just outside of 30 days. How do you think Judge Chutkan has approached the timeline of this case overall, seeing as how this was a disclosure in her court, not necessarily an action carried out by the Department of Justice?

HONIG: I'm glad you raised that, Boris. So there's a lot of confusion about the number of days. I've heard 30. I've heard 60. I've heard 90. A lot of that is just DOJ urban legend. We used to say, well, 30 days, 60. You ask someone from two different districts, they'll tell you two different numbers. The rule I'm citing does not give any specific number of days. It says likely to impact an election, close in time to an election.

With respect to Judge Chutkan, she has generally been in agreement with Jack Smith about trying to expedite this case, not quite as extreme. For example, Jack Smith initially wanted a trial date five months after the indictment. Judge Chutkan set it for seven months after the indictment.

But it's important to note, in its ruling on immunity, the Supreme Court actually went out of its way to excoriate Judge Chutkan for, quote, expediting this case without conducting adequate fact finding and adequate legal analysis.

CAMEROTA: OK, so if you take out your issues with the timeline and your issues with the style of the way they've done this, do you think they still have a strong case against former President Trump?

HONIG: Yes, I do. I want people to understand this. It has been my public opinion spoken many times on CNN, which I hold now that Donald Trump deserved to be indicted for January 6th. He deserves to be indicted for the classified documents case at Mar-a-Lago. The evidence on both looks quite strong to me.

But I just simply don't subscribe to a view that, well, if a person's done something bad, we can bend or change the rules. Maybe I'm a prosecutorial purist in that sense. But I do think these two indictments, the two federal indictments, are well founded. I just object to Jack Smith's tactics here in the stretch run before the election.

SANCHEZ: We may, may not see how jurors feel about it someday. I guess we'll find out sometime shortly after November 5th. Eli Honig, appreciate the analysis. Thanks for joining us.

HONIG: Thank you both.

SANCHEZ: Coming up, allegations of sexual assault against Garth Brooks. How the country music star is responding, next.

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CAMEROTA: A new lawsuit accuses country music star Garth Brooks of sexual assault and battery. The anonymous woman who filed the complaint says she worked as a hairstylist and makeup artist for the award-winning singer. Garth Brooks denies the allegations. He calls them extortion.

CNN's Elizabeth Wagmeister is following this story. So Elizabeth, give us the details here.

ELIZABETH WAGMEISTER, CNN ENTERTAINMENT CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Alisyn. So this lawsuit filed yesterday, as you said, from a woman who says that she was a hair and makeup artist for Garth Brooks. In her lawsuit, she alleges that these incidents allegedly occurred in 2019 after she had started working for him in 2017.

But she first met him back in 1999 because she began working as a makeup artist for his wife, country superstar Trisha Yearwood. Now, this woman who filed anonymously as a Jane Roe alleges that in 2019, she was raped in a hotel room in Los Angeles when they were traveling for business where Garth Brooks was doing a Grammy's tribute performance. She also alleges that that same year, one time at his home where she was to do his hair and makeup, that he walked out of the shower completely naked and forced her hand onto him.

The allegations are very detailed, very vulgar. But as you said, Alisyn, Garth Brooks is denying this. He says that this is extortion.

And I obtained a lengthy statement from his publicist. I want to read part of that to you.

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Here's what Garth Brooks says.

Quote: I have been hassled to no end with threats, lies and tragic tales of what my future would be if I did not write a check for millions of dollars. It has been like having a loaded gun waved in my face. I trust the system. I do not fear the truth. And I am not the man they have painted me to be.

Now, there's an interesting twist here, Alisyn. Hours before this lawsuit was filed yesterday, I reported on a totally separate filing that was filed in mid-September in Mississippi. It came from an anonymous celebrity plaintiff who filed as a John Doe. We now know that John Doe was Garth Brooks. And he was asking the court to prevent this lawsuit from ever coming out because he claims that his sexual assault accuser was defaming him and extorting him.

Now, I reached out to the attorney for her and he says he cannot talk about settlements, but quote, the discussion made by Brooks that he was unwilling to pay millions is simply not true.

CAMEROTA: Elizabeth Wagmeister, thank you very much for all of that reporting. I know you'll stay on that.

Well, meanwhile, Asheville, North Carolina is no one's idea of Hurricane Ali. It was considered safely tucked away in the mountains, far from the effects of extreme weather until Hurricane Helene changed all of that. How climate change could be making impacts like this worse. That's next.

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SANCHEZ: We're following breaking news this afternoon in Evans, Georgia. There we find Georgia Governor Brian Kemp alongside former President Donald Trump. These two have had a contentious relationship ever since the 2020 election. The governor is outlining efforts locally to recover from Hurricane Helene. Let's listen.

GOV. BRIAN KEMP (R-GA): ... But I told him how much we were glad to have him, and we appreciated the work that they were doing. The next morning, we tried to go see a bunch of linemen that were having breakfast at one of the tent cities they had set up at a staging site that had over 500 trucks and over 1,000 people. We got out of the car at 6:30 a.m. before the sun was even up, and most of these hardworking people had already eaten breakfast and were walking out to go crank their truck to start working to get people's power back up whom they've never met.

Those same linemen were going to keep working well into the night. That is the kind of response that we have seen after this crisis from Georgians and from people far beyond in this state. Resilience and hope have been on full display everywhere we've gone, including right here in Columbia County.

We're grateful for those incredible people all over this state, but we're also mindful that every moment of every day since this storm passed of the loss of life and the devastation that it brought.

We knew it was going to be bad, which is why we prepared early, just like they did here in Columbia County. I declared a state of emergency two days ahead of the storm, which gave us time to mobilize and prepare for the worst, and I'm so glad that we did because it impacted literally every part of our state.

Many communities have been scarred with major infrastructure damage, and at one point, at least 1.3 million power meters were not functional and many more Georgians were without power. That number, incredibly, is down to 225,000 as we speak.

In Atlanta, we saw record rainfall with 11.12 inches of rain in a 48- hour period. The previous state record goes back to 1886 when we had 9.6 inches. As many people around the country know, we are an agricultural state. With agriculture serving as our number one industry, Hurricane Helene has wiped out much of this year's crop across the board. Our Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper couldn't be here today --

CAMEROTA: OK, you've been listening there to Governor of Georgia Brian Kemp talking about just the devastation that he's seen in his state. I mean, those stories about young children in their homes, in their beds, a young mother sheltering her kids who were killed. It's awful what they've seen.

I mean, as well as, of course, North Carolina and beyond. Helene has just been, well, we know it's been the deadliest since Hurricane Katrina.

SANCHEZ: Yes, more than 120 people killed as a result of this storm, 33 of them in Georgia. We'll continue to monitor remarks from Governor Kemp and President Trump as we get them. We'll bring you the highlights from that.

We do want to point to some new satellite photos that show specifically how Hurricane Helene decimated the landscape. Look at your screen right now. This is in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Chimney Rock.

You can see effectively what's a river now flowing through where that street and that parking lot used to be. Half of those killed by the storm died in North Carolina. And in the state most devastated by Helene, Asheville has become ground zero. Witnesses there described the scene in the city of 95,000 as, quote, post-apocalyptic.

CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir joins us now. And Bill, many people had considered Asheville to actually have been a climate crisis haven. And this has obviously given new perspective on the meaning of that.

BILL WEIR, CNN CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: Exactly. The idea that maybe there's no such place. I actually have some extended family, Boris, who left Florida 10 years ago for the mountains of North Carolina, thinking, well, at least we don't have to deal with hurricanes anymore.

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And just last year, the Asheville newspaper ran an op-ed worried about the influx of climate migrants. They're trying to get away from coasts, thinking they would be safe. And it's actually a climate city by profession between academic researchers and you've got government agencies there.

There's more folks per capita working on climate in Asheville than anywhere else. And ironically, if you go to check the list of billion dollar disasters being kept by the National Centers for Environmental Information, you get an error message because it happens to be located in Asheville right now. This is just a real lesson.

You heard Brian Kemp say in Georgia, they prepared, they declared an emergency days ahead of time. If there's any lesson coming from Helene, it's we need more capacity to imagine the worst things that can happen so far from our oceans where you think you're safe from a hurricane. But this is every kind of weather pattern.

If you live in a dry area, droughts could get drier. Flash floods get flashier, depending as the water cycles on this overheated earth continue to astound us.

CAMEROTA: But Bill, can you just explain? I mean, it is -- Asheville is so far from the coast. It's nestled in mountains. How was it -- how was Helene supercharged when it arrived there? WEIR: Well, first you had the Gulf of Mexico, incredibly warm waters. That's the engine. That's the fuel that ramped it up. So it gave it a boost as it sort of hit land, made landfall in the Big Bend of Florida.

But then it had been raining so intensely in the southeast for days before landfall that they was sort of what they're calling a brown sea effect in that there was so much moisture on the land. It kept the hurricane alive for miles further inland than it would have maybe in 10 or 20 years ago.

And of course, Buncombe County is like a big bowl and the mudslides that just fill in there. It's not built to absorb this amount of rainfall in such a short amount of time, a lesson. And we have to adapt to these new weather events, hopefully, as the scientists say, while mitigating the cause of it, the fossil fuel pollution that's overheating the earth and making all of these things so much more intense.

But of course, this is an experiment you could do in a seventh grade classroom. But the politics around it, especially --

CAMEROTA: Bill, sorry to interrupt you. We're going to join former President Donald Trump speaking in Evans, Georgia.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: ... I've never seen one like this, Brian. This is the worst I've seen.

And some of them are looking back 25 years. That's a lot.

But I want to thank the governor and everybody for having put out to the extent that they've had to. And it's really incredible.

The -- some of the people that we met just now, Congressman Rick Allen, terrific person, Speaker of the Georgia House, John Burns, who's here, former Congressman Doug Collins. Where's Doug Collins? Is he around here? Doug Collins. What a nice guy he is. Oh, Doug, I haven't seen you in so long. You haven't changed. You look good. You look better, actually, if you want to --

State Senator Max Burns, who's here. And District Attorney Bobby Christine. And we want to thank you.

But we want to thank the people that are working so hard. And we're here in Evans, Georgia to express our support, our love and our prayers. And all of the communities, the suffering, it's not even believable.

When you look and you see the kind of suffering that's going on right now. But one of the biggest, I guess, question marks is the fact that there's so many people missing. I've never seen anything where so many, the numbers are so large of those that are missing, Governor, right?

So that's something that hopefully they'll be found and they'll be found very healthy. But it never looks great. Never looks great. Our hearts break for the more than 200 American families who have lost their lives already. Officially 200. And that number, unfortunately, is going to be going up.

It's one of the deadliest storms in American history. More than two dozen Georgians have died, including a 27-year-old mother and her two precious babies who lived not very far from McDuffie County. And father, a lot of people knew these people. They're great as father and grandfather. I know that such sudden and tragic loss must be almost unbearable. Don't know how you can even take it.

Loved ones all over, all over your county, all over your state, and all over a lot of other states. You have Florida. Think of it. You have Virginia. You have South Carolina. Alabama. North Carolina maybe hit the worst. North Carolina is so bad.

I want to thank Elon Musk, by the way, for his quick action with Starlink. He supplied a lot of equipment to the governor, to Georgia, and to North Carolina in particular. And he acted very, very quickly. They needed communication. There was no communication. The poles are down. The wires are down. And he acted really, really quickly.

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In fact, I called him and I was getting thank you notices already from North Carolina and Georgia, and I wasn't off the phone with him. So I don't know what the hell he's -- I guess he's got some kind of a little special deal going. He works pretty fast, I'll tell you. But he's been great.

And Larry Ellison made a very big contribution. And a friend of the governor's and mine is right here, Steve Witkoff, who also made a very big contribution. Steve, we appreciate it very much. Thank you.

The homes and roads, as the governor told you, are -- it's all being worked on. Everything's being worked on. And the good thing is, when I just met a group, and now I met two groups, and now I'm meeting a third, and I will tell you that I have no doubt that whatever can be done is going to be done. It's going to take time.

It's going to take a lot of effort, and it's a very heartbreaking situation. We're going to go to North Carolina now, and we're going to see some of our friends in North Carolina, some very good friends, and they have just been totally devastated. They've never seen anything like this.

But I want to thank everybody for being here, and we have a big election coming up. And if I'm involved, I told the governor, if I'm involved, they're going to get the best treatment. They're going to get treatment like we did in the past.

We always had, we had a big, the farmers got hit very hard, and I guess they got hit just as hard, or maybe, is this worse, or is this of equal?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Probably worse. TRUMP: Probably worse. That was a bad one. But we worked two or three

times together in big storms, but I don't think we've seen anything like this. But we got it taken care of in record time, and we will be very open and very committed to this state, because it's a great state, and you have great leadership, and the governor, again, is doing a fantastic job. So thank everybody very much for being here.

I appreciate it, and we may see you later. We may not, but we will be back, and whenever the governor needs us, we will be here. And thank you over there. That's a nice group of people. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

SANCHEZ: We've been listening to former President Donald Trump in Evans, Georgia, after receiving a briefing from first responders to Hurricane Helene, and after hearing remarks from Governor Brian Kemp. It appears the former president may take questions. Let's listen.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What is your relationship like now with Governor Kemp?

TRUMP: It's great. No, no, no. It's great. No, we work together. We've always worked together very well, very, really well. It's top.

Yes?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you think the White House will respond?

TRUMP: Yes, of course they are. It's been a terrible response from the White House. They're missing a billion dollars that was used for another purpose, and nobody's seen anything like that. Now, from that standpoint, it's been terrible.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you concerned about disenfranchised voters in Georgia?

TRUMP: I'm not thinking about voters right now. I'm thinking about lives. And to be honest, it's much bigger than anything else. But we're thinking about lives. A lot of lives lost, a lot of people missing. And that's what I'd be focused on right now.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (INAUDIBLE) White House inflation? (INAUDIBLE)

TRUMP: No, it's not. It's inflation has devastated our economy. It's one of the big problems we have. And on jobs, we have the illegals have taken more jobs than anybody else. You have illegals coming in, and they're taking the jobs.

And when you look at the numbers from that standpoint, it's a shame. We have to get the jobs to the people that have lived here for a long time. And they're great, great citizens of our country.

But when you look at the job numbers, they just came out. And then you look at who's getting the jobs. And it's been very unfortunate from that standpoint. You have illegal, you have the migrants. You're reading about it. Now, a lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already. It's been gone for people that came into the country illegally, and nobody's ever seen anything like that. That's a shame.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (INAUDIBLE) Biden says he's (INAUDIBLE) White House. He said he is confident that there would be a (INAUDIBLE).

TRUMP: I don't know anything about what he said. I only can hope that it's going to be free and fair. And I think in this state, it will be. And I hope in every state it will be. And I think we're going to do very well. But right now, we're focused on this. We're not focused on the election.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (INAUDIBLE)

TRUMP: Well, I won it easily in 2016. We actually were very close last time.

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And right now, the recent poll came up. We're up seven. So I think we're pretty far up and we seem to be going up. And she seems to be going down. So I hope we're going to keep it that way.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Former President Donald Trump there answering questions from reporters in Evans, Georgia, making a number of false statements about a, quote, terrible response from the federal government, making accusations that money was misspent on the response. Also responding to comments from President Biden.

CAMEROTA: Yes, so FEMA has put out a response to this. Not to exactly what he was saying, but because he has said it in the past.

No money, they say, is being diverted from disaster response needs. So that is just a quick fact check there.

SANCHEZ: We'll turn it over to "THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper. Thanks so much for joining us.

CAMEROTA: My pleasure. Have a great weekend.

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