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Trump: Critics of Doge's Methods "Don't Love Our Country"; Trump: Instructed Musk to Investigate Military, Education Dept Next; Trump: Musk Dismantling U.S. Agencies "At My Insistence"; Sign Being Removed from USAID Headquarters; DHS Secy Noem Heads to Guantanamo Bay as Trump Admin Plans to Dramatically Expand the Number of People Temporarily Housed There; Sources: WH Pressures ICE for More Migrant Arrests; Military Flying Migrants to Guantanamo Despite Legal Questions. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired February 07, 2025 - 15:00   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: ... information, he says they don't, but they get it easily. They don't have good security in our country, which was sort of hard to follow.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Yes.

KEILAR: And then he jumped off of that to your point to say that they're going to the Department of Education, trillions of dollars perhaps being illegally wasted. He seemed to really lean on that, that they found tremendous corruption. We have not seen anything to back that up at this point.

And then, he was also asked, as this has been developed or has been developing in the middle of this press conference, the Vice President ...

SANCHEZ: Oh, yes.

KEILAR: ... had been asked about, there were only two DOGE employees who had access to that sensitive Treasury Department information. And one of them was 25-year-old Marco Ellis, who after the Wall Street Journal reported that he had been tied to a social media account that advocated for racism and eugenics, had resigned. Well, Elon Musk got on his X, said that he should be brought back. JD Vance hopped on, said he should be brought back, the President ...

SANCHEZ: We should note ...

KEILAR: ... backs him up.

SANCHEZ: ... this is significant, because he apparently posted online, normalize Indian hate. JD Vance's wife is of Indian descent, so that is a significant announcement from JD Vance, then Trump backing him.

Let's go to Kaitlan Collins, who is in the room for the press conference.

And Kaitlan, you asked Trump directly if he had pushed Elon Musk to analyze defense spending and look at money being spent at the Pentagon. And Trump answered yes.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, that was the question we had going in because obviously what Elon Musk has been directed and tasked by the President to do is to reduce government spending and to increase government efficiency. And the Pentagon has the biggest discretionary budget in all of the federal government. If you look at the numbers, it's by far in a way.

And he said for the first time in this press conference that, yes, he had directed Elon Musk to look and review the Pentagon's budget. Obviously, that is a gargantuan task. The Pentagon has not passed an audit, and I'm not sure how long.

And so, that is a question of what that looks like because it seems to be a logical first step there. And so, the question of what that looks like remains to be seen. That has been a big complaint that we've seen from a lot of lawmakers on DOGE is that there hasn't been a ton of transparency as to what exactly is happening.

You're kind of finding out in real time from Twitter on a lot of that. And so, the President was here saying what that purview looks like for Elon Musk, that comes after he was on the cover of Time magazine, portraying him behind the Resolute desk, obviously implying that he has an enormous amount of power here with this effort, and so that's a big question.

The President was also asked about that staffer who was brought onto DOGE and comments that were made in the last three to six months, including the one you just mentioned there, Boris, about normalized Indian hate. JD Vance was in the front row, I should note. The Vice President affirmed that, yes, he said that staffer should be brought back despite those posts.

The other news that the President made here was about those FBI agents, because this has been a fight and a battle that's been going on for a week now between Trump's deputy attorney general, his former personal attorney, Emil Bove, who was asking for a list from the FBI of all the agents who touched the January 6th investigations.

That means if they were interviewing those rioters, if they testified in court, if they carried out any of the basic duties that rank-and- file FBI agents have and they wanted a list. Well, they got a list of numbers and then they got a list of names. And an assurance today we are told from the FBI that if they were going to do anything with those names, there would be a two-day notice, essentially a heads up in case they needed to go to court and make an argument about why those names should not be listed publicly.

I asked Trump if the reason they wanted that list of names is because he wants the agents who worked on the January 6th investigations fired. He did not say he's planning to fire all of them, but he did confirm that he is planning to fire some of them. He cited corruption without citing any evidence or basis for that because the argument here, and lawsuits have been filed over this, so this - that answer might show up in court filings, is what these agents did wrong. Obviously, a lot of them answered to superiors. They were simply doing their jobs. I talked to a representative, a special agent, who said actually one of the FBI agents was helping with that Potomac collision last week and pulling the bodies of passengers out of the water when they had to go back to their office and fill out the questionnaire affirming that they had worked on January 6th investigations, just to give you a sense of what this has been like for the agents. And the President said, yes, that he is planning to fire some of them. The question that remains coming out of this press conference is which ones.

KEILAR: Yes. And to that point, Kaitlan, he said quickly and surgically. We don't know exactly how quickly, right? And we don't know what surgically is going to look like.

COLLINS: Yes, it's a big question, and obviously it's a big question that those agents have. And the one thing that has been clear in the now three weeks that Trump has been in office is that there isn't a lot standing in the way of his agenda that he's pursuing by executive order, by kind of brute force here in Washington. Certainly he doesn't face any resistance, if at all, from Republicans on Capitol Hill, has been the court system. And you've seen judges, and that has been what these FBI agents have been essentially responding with because they were concerned that they were going to be fired as a result of having this memo turned over to the DOJ.

[15:05:08]

So, that is something to watch, to see how many of these agents are fired and what that looks like. Because Kash Patel, who the President mentioned there, the presumably going-to-be-confirmed FBI director, has said that no one would be fired for their political or political reasons. And, obviously, these are rank-and-file agents who don't get to choose the cases they work on. They were just simply assigned to work on the cases of thousands of rioters after January 6th.

I will say the other thing, given that it was the Japanese prime minister here that the President talked about, was his relationship with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Obviously, there was basically no contact between the Biden administration and the North Koreans. They tried, but there just really wasn't anything there. And I asked if the Japanese prime minister, who is newly in his role, wants to see that restarted. How does that affect him, obviously, as they are a major player in this.

And President Trump himself talked about that communication, arguing it was important. The question is whether or not it makes a difference and what that looks like in this term now that Trump is back in office.

SANCHEZ: Kaitlan, one other thing that stood out is that Trump was asked directly if he had given Elon Musk any red lines when it came to his work with DOGE. And he essentially said that he did not, that he had directed Musk, go there, go here, go there, but he didn't say that they had gotten to a point where he told him to stay away from anything. I found that really interesting. COLLINS: Well, that's been the big question, is who Elon Musk answers to here at the White House. Obviously President Trump is the President and he was arguing earlier this week when reporters were pressing him on the details of how that dynamic works, since Elon Musk is a special government employee. It means he can only be in the government for a certain period of days within a 365-day period. And the President was saying that if he has conflicts with something, that he won't go near it.

Well, the question was who was policing those conflicts. The White House said earlier this week that Elon Musk himself was. And so, you can kind of see what that dynamic looks like here where the President was not outlining any areas where Elon Musk cannot touch despite the numerous federal contracts that we know he has. And that has been the big question that lawmakers have had for this White House.

KEILAR: Yes, great questions there. Kaitlan Collins, thank you so much live for us from the East Room. And we're here now with Mark Preston and Alex Marquardt in studio.

Mark, what stood out to you there?

MARK PRESTON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, you know, I just think overall, let's just take a step back and think about what's happening now just in the past, what, two weeks now or three weeks it's been. We're in the fog of war right now. There's so much happening right now that people are not necessarily able to digest at all and understand what's happening. And one side is really fighting the war in a way with no opposition, and that's Donald Trump.

There is no opposition from the Democratic Party. I don't even know what they could do, to be perfectly honest with you, but we've seen nothing from them and we've seen nothing from Republicans in the U.S. Congress or the Supreme Court for that matter at all. What I do think is going to happen, though, is that, you know, give it a couple weeks, give it a couple months, and I think some people are going to look back and say, wow, there was a lot of destruction. There was a lot of needless destruction that didn't need to happen.

SANCHEZ: I also think we had, we may still have it, this shot outside of USAID headquarters of a worker on a cherry picker. This is actually moments ago. You see the cherry picker there. Soon after this video was taken, the actual lettering above the entrance there, the U.S. Agency for International Development, that started being removed.

I wonder, Alex - and we have video of it now - as you hear President Trump describe U.S. investments in agencies like USAID as obscene, as corrupt, what this does for allies around the world who rely on the kind of aid and the kind of programs that agencies like USAID provide?

ALEX MARQUARDT, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: And he's talked about it being run by lunatics. And it's not just what the allies see. It's also what the adversaries see. And you're absolutely right that this was one of America's strongest tools of soft power, showing that the U.S. is a generous, benevolent country that will come to the aid of less fortunate people all around the world. It was, you know, its officials would argue, terrific branding for the United States. USAID plastered everywhere when it's feeding people or, you know, helping women give birth, and the list of programs goes on and on and on.

One of the major fears right now, guys, is what the adversaries are going to do, and primarily Russia and China. And I've been talking to countless lawmakers, aid officials, foreign officials in the past week, and they have talked about already seeing Russia and China make moves to try to get in there, whether it's providing programs or aid or money for programs that the U.S. has stopped funding, whether it's just starting the conversations to get things going.

[15:10:01]

So, what we saw just there during that press conference with the letters coming down, this really is the culmination of just an extraordinary week for what is - what has been for decades, an independent agency. And last weekend, we reported first that the DOGE guys had tried to barge their way into that building. They eventually got in. They got access to some very sensitive information. And throughout the course of the week, we have seen the administration chip away at USAID, and it will essentially, maybe not culminate, but there will be a big moment tonight when almost the entire workforce will no longer be effectively working. Most of them will be put on leave if not fired altogether.

The workforce reduced to, we understand, around 300 essential personnel. The White House pushing back on that, saying it might be closer to 600, so we're trying to determine the exact number. They might be realizing that perhaps that 300 number is too small, but either way, it's going to be a fraction of the overall 10,000.

And USAID, as of tonight, will be certainly a shell of what it once was. But there is, we're starting to see some legal pushback in the courts. USAID staffers have launched a lawsuit against the administration. How effective that's going to be, we'll see.

KEILAR: And how - when they want to do something, like we hear Trump recently talking about what the U.S. should be doing when it comes to Gaza.

PRESTON: Right.

KEILAR: If the U.S. wants to do something in the region, they need their people in the region at least to coordinate with local partners. They won't have that. And I wonder if the administration realizes, I mean, what is going to happen, Mark, when it comes to a moment where they think, oh, yes, you know, we need to do something, and there's no one to do it. They've come back or they've come back to the U.S., they've gone somewhere else, they've moved out.

PRESTON: You know what's interesting about Gaza too, and he said this before this news conference, because I will give him this, he certainly will go to the mic and he will answer questions.

KEILAR: Yes. PRESTON: I don't think people necessarily like what they're hearing right now, but he is answering questions. The thing about Gaza is that he said earlier in the day, we don't have to do anything right now, we'll sit on it. We'll sit on it. We'll just let it sit there. That is exactly what a real estate developer does. They hold land, they sit on it, they wait for it to go up in value and then they build.

Everything he does, he thinks about it as a business person. Some people will say that's a great way to go through how you should run government. In some ways, it is. But listen to this, he told us he's going to get involved in Nissan coming in and negotiating a deal with U.S. Steel, and then JD Vance is going to negotiate the deal for TikTok. So, now our president and vice president are doing business deals?

KEILAR: He made that clear today. He said he'd be mediating and arbitrating this deal when it comes to Japan and investing in U.S. Steel. Pretty interesting.

SANCHEZ: Yes. Yes, Alex, I do wonder, as you hear President Trump there confirming that Elon Musk is going to take a look at defense spending and how the Pentagon spends its money, what does that mean? If we're seeing what it means for other government agencies, what could it mean for DOD?

MARQUARDT: Yes. I mean, the slash and burn approach has just been remarkable. And on the foreign aid side, we've seen them basically put a halt to everything as they start to comb through things. And we appear to have lost ...

KEILAR: We still have audio, so that's the good news. But we are going to get in a quick break here as we look at this video of USAID. The letters there, having been the logo plastered over, the letters having been brought down, and ...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The lights are back.

KEILAR: The lights are back. That's how it works. They go out ...

SANCHEZ: We flipped the switch back on.

KEILAR: If they go back out, we're going to go to break, but here we are. And I do want to now talk about a very important part of this press conference, which was the piece of the FBI agents that we heard our Kaitlan Collins talking about. Mike Clark, who's the president of the Society of Former Agents of FBI, is with us. He's a retired supervisory special agent.

Mike, what did you think? You heard the President there saying, when Kaitlan asked, will you fire all of these FBI agents who worked on January 6th cases. He said, no, but some. So, it's - the answer is no, but yes. He said, some are corrupt, and they will - they're gone or they will be, and they'll be quickly or surgically gone. Mike?

MIKE CLARK, PRESIDENT, SOCIETY OF FORMER AGENTS OF THE FBI: Yes, Brianna. I certainly snapped to attention with that question. And one of the key things here is that we've been fighting for are the due process rights of the agents. And if someone did something corrupt or illegal, they could be held accountable. But we certainly want, you know, it to be a fair process. And as Mr. Patel testified, he said all employees will be protected against retribution.

[15:15:00]

And we're certainly going to hold him to his word on that.

KEILAR: All right. Mike, stick with us. We'll be right back after a quick break with more on what was a pretty eventful press conference there at the White House.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:19:44]

SANCHEZ: Today, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem heads to the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She's there to assess the Trump administration's announced plans to temporarily hold 10s of thousands of migrants there. Those which the administration calls the worst of the worst.

Planning and construction is already underway, an effort that is expected to take weeks. And we should note, the administration has already begun military flights transporting migrants to the site, which has an interesting history. Guantanamo Bay has been used before to detain asylum seekers and refugees.

From 1994 to 1995, more than 55,000 Cubans and Haitians who were intercepted at sea were kept on the base, including, full disclosure, some of my cousins. But then in response to the September 11th terror attacks, these facilities at Guantanamo were repurposed to hold detainees in the war on terror.

And on January 11, 2002, the first detainees from Afghanistan and Pakistan arrived at the temporary facility of Camp X-Ray. This is actually a photo of Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees in a holding area at Camp X-Ray.

In 2003, at the peak of its population, they hit 684 detainees. You might recall, during this time, the base was mired in controversy over questions of due process and allegations of torture. There was this Senate report back in 2014 that highlighted the interrogation techniques against an associate of Osama bin Laden named Abu Zubaydah, excuse me.

The Intel Committee said that the experience he had were awful. He had at least 83 applications of waterboarding. He spent over 11 days in a coffin-sized confinement box and was subjected to other interrogation methods like sleep deprivation. We should also note at least nine detainees have died while in custody at Guantanamo Bay.

For years, human rights organizations have criticized the operations there, and at one point, Amnesty International called Guantanamo Bay the gulag of our times. This is how President George W. Bush responded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I just want you to remember we are in a war against these terrorists. My most solemn obligation is to protect the American people from further attack. These people are being treated humanely. There are very few prison systems around the world that have seen such scrutiny as this one. And for those of you here in the continent of Europe who have doubt, I'd suggest buying an airplane ticket and going down to look. Take a look for yourself.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: There were eventually legal challenges for the detainees against the Bush administration's detention powers. The administration argued that because the detainees were not on U.S. soil, they were therefore not protected by the U.S. Constitution. Ultimately, the Supreme Court weighed in with two crucial rulings.

The first in 2006 when justices decided that the U.S. government's power to conduct military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay should be limited, and then in 2008 when the court ruled that detainees do have constitutional right to challenge their detentions. The base in that ruling would become an issue out on the campaign trail in 2008, leading to this announcement by then newly elected President Obama during his first State of the Union.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: The prison would remain open throughout his presidency. President Biden also said he would close the facility, but that didn't happen either, leading us to where we are now, where we could see some 30,000 migrants housed at Guantanamo. Brianna?

KEILAR: In the roughly three weeks since President Trump's inauguration, more than 8,000 people have been arrested by federal immigration authorities. But a White House official tells CNN that's not nearly enough that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is, quote, way behind. Sources say White House senior officials expressed frustration with ICE's calls for not meeting its marks.

Chad Wolf was the acting Homeland Security Secretary in Trump's first term. He's also the executive director of the America First Policy Institute and he's with us now.

Chad, thank you for being with us.

We heard yesterday immigration czar Tom Homan saying that he had a meeting with ICE leadership today and he was going to find out exactly who was released and why. This is obviously a concern of the White House's. What do you make about this tension between the White House and immigration officials over releases?

CHAD WOLF: Well, look, I think there's high expectations. President Trump and his senior team certainly have an agenda. Tom Homan's part of that team that they're trying to execute. And so this is the reality where policy and execution kind of butt up against one another. And so, making sure that this continues to unfold.

Now, again, we're only on the third week here, so - but again, to make sure that this unfolds overtime, they've got to stay in close contact. So, my guess is there's going to be a lot of tense phone calls. There's going to be a lot of pressure because a lot of this is being done for the first time at this scale and the scale in which they - the President wants to see them.

So, obviously, the team's very good, but they've got a lot of work ahead of them.

[15:25:04]

KEILAR: Yes. They're only in the third week, but ICE is already operating over capacity, hovering around 108 percent. And we heard the White House Press Secretary confirming yesterday 461 immigrants detained in the wave of arrests have since been released. And in part, it's because of that lack of bed space.

Are they biting off more than they can chew? And why do these arrests at these numbers if they can't see the process through as they promised?

WOLF: Well, again, I think that's part of why they're opening up additional beds in Guantanamo that you just did the piece on. I think part of that is to do that very, very quickly so that you can start to transport down there. Look, we're talking about criminal aliens in American communities, so you want to pick those individuals up and you want to deport them. You want to make American communities safer. That's what we're talking about here.

So, I don't think just because there's a bed space issue or some other issue, you just say, well, we're not going to go after criminal aliens. I don't think that that's the right approach. And again, the administration is doing everything that they can. They'll continue to do everything they can. I think they'll bring more bed space online pretty quickly, and you'll start seeing more and more of these folks not only detained, but removed.

KEILAR: Wouldn't Trump have had more bed space if he hadn't scuttled that bipartisan border bill that included more bed space last year?

WOLF: No, I don't believe that that's the case. Look, that bill was doomed from the start. It was not effective. It would not have secured the border from last year. And the ability to bring on bed space is you can do that rapidly. They're doing that with Guantanamo and other things. There's a lot of state and local beds that you can use. So, again, you've just got to scale up pretty quickly and make sure that you're able to do that.

KEILAR: That was, again, a bipartisan bill that was negotiated by Sen. Lankford from Oklahoma, certainly ...

WOLF: Yes.

KEILAR: ... not a moderate Republican.

But I do want to ask you, when you mentioned Guantanamo, do you have concerns? Because even as you - they're looking here, right, to kind of let off a pressure valve as they need to because they are doing so many arrests, do you have any concerns about the problems that bringing migrants to Gitmo could create? For instance, the legality of it, how migrants might access the legal services that they're entitled to?

WOLF: Well, a couple of different things. Just to go really quick back to that bipartisan bill, just because a bill is bipartisan doesn't make it operationally effective. And so, there were a number of concerns with that bill. As we talk about Guantanamo ...

KEILAR: Yes, I mean, it would have shut down the border.

WOLF: ... look, they've got to stand that system up.

KEILAR: They would have shut down the border and brought numbers down ...

WOLF: It wouldn't.

KEILAR: ... as we saw ultimately it did.

WOLF: Now ...

KEILAR: It would have triggered at a certain number per day.

WOLF: It would not have done any of that. It wouldn't have done any of that. But look, when we talk about Guantanamo ...

KEILAR: They would - it would have ...

WOLF: They've got to scale that ...

KEILAR: ... but okay.

WOLF: ... they've got to scale that up.

They've got to scale that up. They've got to make sure that they're able to process immigrants just like they do here in domestic facilities, get them to a flight line and remove them. Again, many of these individuals that they're picking up here don't have a legal right to be in the United States or have overstayed their visa or have a final order of removal.

So, they've been through the due process system. This is just a matter of making sure that they put them in a bed to get them to a flight line to remove them back to their home countries.

KEILAR: It's sort of like a pressure valve release.

And I do want to ask you, because now there's this issue of transporting so many and a lot of Americans totally on board with this, as you're aware, right? They see this. They're completely onboard with it. They support it.

But I do wonder, at a time when government spending is getting so much scrutiny by the Trump administration, this use of military planes, I mean, why is that necessary to transport migrants when it costs so much more to do it with a military plane? I mean, if you're talking about fiscal responsibility, this is by a factor - it's a lot, right? It's a factor of 2.5 or even up to eight times, depending on the type of military aircraft that you're using, compared to a charter flight that DHS would normally be able to use. Why do it that way?

WOLF: Look, I think they're looking at all of those options. I think they're not only using military aircraft, but they are using these charter aircraft that you talk about. Finding those airframes, there's a limited amount of those that ICE has access to. So, opening the aperture and using DOD planes to make some of these removal flights, I think, you know, in large part, it's been untested before, so I think they wanted to start to see how that would work, was it effective and is it going to work.

And then, as this deportation plan and removal operation continues to scale up - again, we're in the third week - as it continues to scale up, they'll have muscle memory and they'll understand how to use that.

[15:30:04]

So again, I don't think it's one or the other. I think that they're looking at both options.

KEILAR: So, you're saying ...