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DOJ Charges 3 People in Thwarted Iranian Plot to Kill Donald Trump; Trump Allies Jockeying For High-Powered White House Roles; Special Counsel "Assessing" Future of Trump Criminal Case. Aired 2- 2:30p ET

Aired November 08, 2024 - 14:00   ET

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

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BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Breaking news into CNN. The Department of Justice is charging three people over what it says was a thwarted Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump before the election. We have new details on that alleged plot and the suspects.

Plus, the battle for top spots in Trump's new administration is on. We have new reporting as the President elect fills his most important post with a key member of his inner circle.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: And a new immigration setback for the Biden administration, what it means for certain immigrants married to U.S. citizens with just months to go before Trump begins his second term. We are still following breaking news this hour.

The Justice Department is filing federal charges against three people in connection to a thwarted Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump before the presidential election.

SANCHEZ: And a prosecutor say that one of those people was tasked by Iranian officials to watch and ultimately kill Trump. The alleged assassination plot just disclosed today moments ago. CNN's Evan Perez is following this story. Also with us, CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst and former Deputy Director of the FBI, Andy McCabe.

Evan, first to you. What are we hearing from DOJ about this?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, they say that this is a year's long effort, right, by the Iranians to target known dissidents, people who they believe are enemies of the Iranian regime. And the primary activity, according to these court papers filed in federal court in Manhattan, was a prominent dissident in New York who the people who were recruited to assassinate her were essentially following. They were following this person over a period of months, going to places where they were going to speak, for instance, at Fairfield University in Connecticut. This was a $100,000 promise to pay for this assassination.

And one of the things you'll see in the court documents are some pictures of some firearms that according to prosecutors, two of these people, you know, had collected as part of this effort to try to perhaps carry out this assassination. Now, Farhad Shakeri is the name of the IRGC operative at the center of all this. He's 51 years old and he lives in Iran. He's at large. The other two people who were charged were presented in federal court in Manhattan. And they've been ordered held pending trial.

Now, what we know is this, that, you know, along with trying to assassinate a known dissident, somebody who has been on the list of -- targeted list of the Iranians for a number of years, was a plot to try to kill Donald Trump. This was in October. On October 7th, Shakeri says that he was tasked with trying to find ways to kill Donald Trump. Not the first time that the Iranians have tried to do this. You remember earlier this summer, there was a plot of a Pakistani man who was sent here to try to recruit people to try to kill Donald Trump. That was something that the FBI exposed over the summer.

According to the prosecutors, there's also other people that were on this list, two Jewish-Americans. We don't know their names. According to prosecutors, this was $500,000 that the Iranians were planning to pay, to kill these two prominent Jewish-Americans in New York City, as well as targeting Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka.

Now, you guys know that the Iranians have been doing some of this for a number of years. There's a number of people from the Trump administration that have been under protection from the Secret Service because of threats to their lives. We also know that over the summer, they believe that there was a number of people in this administration also who were on the targeted list for the Iranians.

KEILAR: Andy, what is your reaction to the news and your concerns here about what appears to be Iran not letting up on this desire?

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Yeah. Brianna, I'm obviously greatly concerned about it and have been for quite some time, which is why I'm not entirely shocked by the fact that this is still going on.

I wrote a piece in 2020 after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, basically warning or reminding, I should say, our intelligence folks that the Iranians will never let that action go unpunished. That, of course, was the hour targeted killing of Soleimani in Iraq.

He was a beloved figure in Iran, worshiped by the Iranian people and revered by the government.

[14:05:06]

And this is something that's not going away. I think the haste to do this quickly, according to the court documents, it seems that the operative was given a short amount of time to get this done. And there's clearly a desire there to try to do it before the election. I think that reflects the fact that they probably thought their window of opportunity was closing if Donald Trump won the election, which of course, he has now, getting to him with assassins or some sort of an assassination attempt would become much harder. So all of this makes a lot of sense to me. It's consistent with how

they've acted in the past. We know they've tried to assassinate people on U.S. soil (ph) before. In 2011, they tried to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States here in the U.S. So it is part and parcel of the way this terrorist regime takes care of their business.

SANCHEZ: Evan, how many details do we have related to any actual plot, any assassination plot that these suspects might have put together?

PEREZ: Well, there's a lot of detail about the plot to try to kill the dissident, the person who is a critic of the Iranian regime. There is The FBI has plenty of details and pictures that these men allegedly took of this person's front door in Brooklyn. It's clear that they surveilled this person over a period of months. And then they reported back to Shakeri who was essentially their handler back in Tehran.

So they -- the FBI was onto this very, very early. You could see them looking at cloud accounts where there's photographs and there's messages being exchanged back in February of 2024. So there is a lot of detail on that part of it.

As Andy points out, they didn't seem to get very far on this idea of killing Donald Trump. It was not until October 7th that he was -- that he says that he's been tasked with this. So it was clear that this was something that was more recent that happened. And, you know, we've talked about this. The former President is a big target of the Iranians. There were two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, but none of them were related to Iran. But what has happened is the Secret Service has had to beef up the presence around the former President. Of course, now that he's president elect, his protection changes. It's going to be a lot harder to try to get to him.

KEILAR: Yeah. And yet it seems, Andy, that's the thing, is that Iran may just keep trying. I wonder what you think the threat profile to Trump looks like, especially considering this is a time where the Secret Service is grappling with some huge vulnerabilities and how it protects its protectees?

MCCABE: They've really got their hands full right now, Brianna, as you mentioned. And they're under -- and there are enormous demands levied upon them because of the person they are trying to protect, Donald Trump, who's clearly an active target from some very competent foreign intelligence organizations, particularly Iran. At the same time, they're struggling with kind of, you know, energizing their own ranks and responding to all the problems that were evident in the first assassination attempt at Butler.

I think that the increased resources that have been dedicated to President elect Trump's safety and will be dedicated to him now that he is in fact a president elect will likely make him much, much harder to get, you know, from the Iranians perspective or anyone else.

And in addition to just the security aspects of trying to get to a president or president elect, you've elevated greatly the stakes. You know, a rogue nation like Iran taking a shot at someone running for the office is not the same as taking a shot at the person who's just been elected or who has been inaugurated the president.

So Iran does these sort of, you know, subversive, off-the-grid things because they don't want a direct military conflict with the United States. It may be that they recalculate here, decide, you know what, Donald Trump is too sensitive a target at this point. And they may just continue looking at all those other folks who are here in the United States for whom they have ill will and evil intent. So we'll have to watch it very closely.

KEILAR: All right. Andy, thank you so much. Evan, thank you for the reporting.

Just days after an historic electoral victory, President elect Trump is rolling up his sleeves, getting ready to move on his agenda. Step one is filling those key positions in the incoming administration.

And CNN is learning that it's an all-out battle among Trump loyalists who have descended on his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida as they're vying for those top jobs. Trump has already crossed one role off the list. He's chosen his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, to serve as his Chief of Staff.

SANCHEZ: And the sources tell us that Trump is also going through executive orders, policies that he wants to implement and regulations he plans to reverse in the White House on day one.

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Let's turn now to CNN's Kristen Holmes, life for us in West Palm Beach. And Kristen, you have some new reporting on when we might find out about other roles in the administration. What can you tell us?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, Boris and Brianna, I am told by two sources familiar with the matter that they believe that there could be announcements for White House positions as early as today. They are trying to fill as many positions as quickly as they can to try and get this administration to take shape so that they can start working on some of those bigger positions like the cabinet positions, also so they can start working on those executive orders, on those various policy decisions. They can have the people in place who need to be able to implement those decisions or at least be able to funnel those decisions through those people then to get to Donald Trump or to the heads of the transition team.

Now, I'm also told that the way that the transition team has been structured for the last several months is not going to change. But they are going through the process now of really evaluating the best way to get these names out. But also, the information that is coming in, how exactly are they filtering the information? Is it going directly from these various teams, to the co-chairs, to Donald Trump? What role is Susie Wiles going to play? How is the communications department of the transition team going to play out? All of that is being worked out as we speak.

Another big question right now, the timing on that meeting with Joe Biden. We are told it could happen as early as next week. But all of this is still being filtered out. As I said, and I can't stress the urgency enough here, his team is really trying to make this work and try to make it work quickly so they have all their pieces in place and that this looks nothing like 2017 when Donald Trump stepped into the White House. They want this to be a completely well-oiled machine by the time he actually steps foot in the Oval Office.

KEILAR: And Kristen, talk to us more about what's playing out behind the scenes as you have people jockeying for these top spots.

HOLMES: What we're seeing and what we're hearing from these various loyalists, people who have been around Donald Trump's orbit for some time is that there is a lot of infighting, there's a lot of knife fighting, there's a lot of backstabbing going on, which you -- isn't that surprising, particularly given the circumstances and the fact that it is Trump world. I spoke to one person earlier today who said there are people coming out of the woodwork that they've never even heard of trying to get administration jobs, trying to get access to the former President, now president elect.

One of the things that I have thought was so interesting that we learned yesterday, Kaitlan Collins reporting out, that Susie Wiles was chosen so quickly to be sort of a filter for some of these people. That's the role that she served on the campaign. And that is the role that she's going to serve now in the administration. So part of these -- part of her putting in position was to kind of filter through this knife fighting to try and make sure people were going to her and not directly to President Elect Trump. Because as we know, once people get into his ear, that's when things start to get complicated.

But just one example of one of the things I'm hearing, there are several people up for secretary of state. One of them, we've heard the name floated, Marco Rubio. One person who has actively spoken out against Marco Rubio multiple times, saying he would stab his dad in the back, is Don Jr. So how that all works out? Don Jr. has said he's going to play a big role in the transition, but that's just the tip of the iceberg on how some of this infighting is playing out.

SANCHEZ: Kristen Holmes, quite an update from near Mar-a-Lago. Thank you so much.

We're following some new developments in a major legal case against the president elect. Special Counsel Jack Smith says his office is assessing how to move forward with the January 6th crime criminal case against Trump. And we have Katelyn Polantz with us now on this.

Katelyn, what can you tell us about this new court filing and where this case stands?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Court filing at high noon today, the death Knell of the January 6th case from the Special Counsel's Office against Donald Trump. So this is the moment where we see the first indication from Jack Smith that this case is going to be winding down, at least while Donald Trump is the sitting president incoming and potentially even before that while he's president elect. Smith asked the court to remove all of the deadlines in this case,

which were set up to progress the case toward trial. About 30 minutes later afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan, the trial court judge in this case, she agreed and said vacated. There's no more work to be done here at this time, no moving forward on this case. The Justice Department said because of the unprecedented circumstance of Trump coming in as the president elect, they want to have some discussions within the Justice Department about what to do that would be consistent with their policy. We know that their policy is they're not going to prosecute a sitting president. It very well may also extend to the president elect as well.

How exactly this case unravels with Trump?

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We're going to get an update from the Justice Department at the beginning of December. So procedurally, it could work in a couple different ways. We don't know if it'll be -- if they'll ask for it to be dismissed entirely or something else in court. But this is the winding down of Jack Smith's case against Trump for his actions after the 2020 election.

SANCHEZ: Katelyn Polantz, thank you so much for the update.

So as President Elect Trump's transition team works to fill those White House positions, Democrats also have their work cut out for them, and that is figuring out the path ahead after some significant losses.

I want to talk more about all of this with Democratic Congressman Dan Kildee of Michigan. Congressman, thank you so much for being with us. When you joined us a few days before the election, you had talked about encountering women voters in split ticket households whose husbands were voting for Trump, but they were supporting Vice President Harris, yet Harris did worse among women than both Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Why do you think that is?

DAN KILDEE, (D) CONGRESSMAN FROM MICHIGAN: Yeah. First of all, of course, it's a big disappointment. And it's a question that we're going to have to spend some time answering. I think ultimately, we've got to do a much better job of communicating what we've done and what we plan to do. And I think the particularly difficult challenge in this election is to not get drawn into what may very well have been Donald Trump's intentional distractions from those sort of core economic messages that we were trying to break through.

I mean, every time we were talking about cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, or his Madison Square Garden rally, we weren't talking about what Democrats stand for when it comes to that economic kitchen table message that really was front and center. So while there were women who were breaking from their husbands on an issue of reproductive rights, as it turns out, the central issue was not reproductive rights to the extent that it was in 2022. We've got to do a better job communicating on economics. And we obviously didn't do now. And having said that, it was a mixed set of results. You know, we may gain seats in the House of Representatives. There is even a narrow path where we can have a majority. So it's not like all is lost, but I do think we have to recognize. We failed to break through on those core economic messages. We've just got to do a better job with that.

SANCHEZ: On that question of breaking through with the economic message, it strikes me that Harris lost your State of Michigan and specifically counties where working class union voters once reliably broke for Democrats. When you talk about changing the messaging, how much of that has to do with perhaps a level of dissonance, an asymmetry between the message that they're hearing from Democrats about the achievements of the Biden administration versus the pain that a lot of voters felt when it comes to the price of everyday goods because it's easy to point to numbers and say, look, the economy is doing really well, but whether people actually feel that is different.

KILDEE: Yeah, Boris, I think you really put the finger on the challenge that we had. While we could have had, I guess, an economics session and talked about how the U.S. is faring much better when it comes to inflation than other industrialized nations, that doesn't really sell the point. We need to do a better job of helping people understand that we feel the pain that they're facing. We get it. Not try to talk them out of that pain, but point out that we're better off with the policies that Democrats have put in place dealing with this challenge. That's a harder message to sell. I think that's one aspect of it.

But I think when we look back on this period of time, I think we're also going to see that there's a general anxiety in our society right now. Some of it comes out of COVID, some of it is sort of the fractured nature of the way people consume information. And it is very clear that Donald Trump, just the persona, is much more capable than we would like to think in connecting with people's anxieties, maybe fueling them to a certain extent. And that was a source of motivation for some voters who felt like they just wanted to change because they feel this general anxiety, economic anxiety, personal anxiety, whatever it might be.

I know that seems like a bit of a psychoanalysis, but I really do, just based on the people that I talked to, the sense of uncertainty he was able to tap into, and we didn't have a strong enough answer for that.

SANCHEZ: And to that point, I've heard some Democrats argue that the party is hamstrung by catering too much to the left on certain issues. I've heard some of your fellow folks on Capitol Hill, Democrats talking about going too far to the left on transgender rights and on immigration.

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Do you think that that may have alienated working class voters? Because from someone like independent Senator Bernie Sanders who caucuses with Democrats, his feeling is that Democrats didn't present radical enough ideas on an economic front. I wonder where you land on that spectrum.

KILDEE: Well, no, I think, first of all, we shouldn't apologize for the fact that we do support transgender rights and the people who are a part of that community. What Republicans were able to do is exploit that by using extreme examples and putting Democrats in a position of having to defend the fact that we actually do stand up for human rights. I think what they did was pretty cynical, but effective.

I guess I would disagree with Senator Sanders in the sense that we have not only proposed but enacted, I think, very progressive policies. Like, I think of the child tax credit, the refundable child tax credit. You know, I'm leaving Congress at the end of this term. It's the best vote I ever cast in the 12 years that I've served in Congress. It's a progressive approach to lifting children out of poverty. We shouldn't hide from that. We shouldn't pretend that we didn't do it. And in fact, the reason it's not permanent is because Republicans blocked it.

Had we focused more attention on some of those issues? I think perhaps we would have been better off. We don't have to remake our policies. We have to present them in a much more effective way and with much, much greater clarity in language that people use at their kitchen tables.

SANCHEZ: Congressman, you kind of answered a bit of my final question for you, seeing that you are retiring, you are leaving Congress. I wonder 12 years from where you first joined the institution, your reflections now, how different is Congress from when you first entered? And what do you think given the fact that it appears that Republicans are on track to potentially take both the Senate and the House?

KILDEE: Well, I mean, I'm distressed at the state of our democracy, and I'm distressed particularly at the state of the U.S. Congress and especially under Republican leadership. What I worry about is the difficulty that Republicans have had in embracing the reality that there is no functional majority right now in the Congress. And there's not likely to be a big majority for either party, which means, the only way we're going to get anything done is if we can somehow set aside this red versus blue paradigm and just figure out how to get things done and have that more functional center emerge as a stronger voice, rather than allowing the tail to wag the dog, which is unfortunately what both Kevin McCarthy and Speaker Johnson seem to be committed to.

I hope we can put that behind us. I hope we can get back to some modicum of sanity and bipartisanship. And if we don't, we're going to have a whole lot more trouble than we can handle in this country. I wish Democrats had won.

But even if we don't, we've got to figure out a way to work together. And I don't see that happening quite the way I did the first few terms that I served in Congress.

SANCHEZ: Congressman Dan Kildee, thank you so much for the time. And congratulations on retirement. KILDEE: Thanks, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Of course. When we come back, a new setback for the outgoing Biden administration. Why a judge just struck down a policy that helped immigrants married to U.S. citizens.

KEILAR: Plus, why one of the conservative justices that Donald Trump put on the Supreme Court could be the last hope for the court's shrinking liberal wing during a second Trump term.

And the Dutch government condemns violent attacks on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam. Police there are calling the incidents antisemitic. We'll take you live to Amsterdam next.

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KEILAR: Days after the Democrats election defeat, the White House is now responding to another loss for the Biden administration. And this is one from the courts. A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump has struck down President Biden's plan that helped protect undocumented spouses of American citizens from being deported.

SANCHEZ: This ruling could directly impact as many as 800,000 people according to some estimates. CNN's Kevin Liptak joins us now with the details.

So Kevin, help us understand the judge's decision and then what comes next?

KEVIN LIPTAK, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Yeah. And this is a big setback for President Biden's immigration policy. And it does leave a lot of people in a degree of uncertainty. And remember, President Biden signed this back in June after Congress had failed to move on comprehensive immigration reform. And what it did was shield undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation.

And you had to have been here for 10 years. You couldn't pose any kind of security threat. And there were hundreds of thousands of people who could have benefited from this. Remember, President Biden said at the time that this was a way to keep families together, families who had been in the United States and made their entire lives here able to keep them together.

But what Texas and a number of other Republican led states argued was that this would strain their state resources and could potentially incentivize illegal immigration. And this judge sided with those states. And he said that President Biden exceeded his executive authority in doing this. He said that it stretched legal interpretation past its breaking point.

Now, what the White House says today is that they disagree with this ruling. They're evaluating next steps. And a spokesman said that this ruling sides with Republican state officials who are seeking to force U.S. citizens and their families, people who have lived in the United States for more than 10 years, to either separate or live in the shadows in constant fear of deportation.

They don't say specifically whether they're going to appeal this. And at the end of the day, the Trump administration was going to get rid of this anyway. They certainly would not have appealed this in the courts. And so it just gives you a sense of how limited the Biden administration is at this point in the lame duck presidency. And certainly, there's a lot of uncertainty now for these families layered on top of the additional uncertainty of a Trump presidency. Of course, he has promised mass deportations for illegal immigrants.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. We'll see how the Biden administration responds given that they're out of office on January 20th. And as you said, their options are limited. Kevin Liptak, thank you so much.

So Donald Trump's election victory could potentially give him another chance to shape the Supreme Court of --

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