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Trump: Ukraine Will Be Part of Any Peace Negotiations; Trump Appears to Cast Doubt on Whether McConnell is a Polio Survivor; Judge Extends Pause on Trump's Dismantling of USAID. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired February 13, 2025 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

JILL DOUGHERTY, JOURNALIST AND ACADEMIC: ... President Trump is quoting almost everything that Vladimir Putin wants.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Let's go to Alex Marquardt, who's also with us. I believe he's coming to us live from Munich, where a security conference is set to kick off in the coming days. And Alex, Trump alluded to the Munich security conference in part because we know that his vice president, J.D. Vance, is set to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump, here describing that there's a lot of forks in the game, is the way that he described these negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. What does this actually mean for Kyiv?

ALEX MARQUARDT, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, and you're also going to have Secretary of State Marco Rubio among other American officials here alongside European officials here in Munich when this conference gets started tomorrow. So there's really the main focus of this, of the next few days here in Munich, is going to be Ukraine. I'm not sure that Kyiv took much comfort in what President Trump just said about, of course, Ukraine will be involved in the conversation.

There certainly is a sense, I think, among Ukrainian officials that the U.S. is barreling ahead with a deal over their country, mostly talking to Russia about it. We heard President Zelenskyy saying in the wake of those two phone calls with President Trump and President Putin, and then his own with President Trump, that it was not pleasant, the fact that the Russians got the first call.

But here we have President Trump saying that, of course, the Ukrainians are going to be at the table when it comes to striking a deal.

And the big question now, Boris, and I think this is what we're going to be focused on for the next few days, is what does the contours -- what do the contours of that deal actually look like? And I agree with Jill Dougherty in that there are a lot of people wondering why the U.S. is giving so much to Russia before the negotiations have even started.

Pete Hegseth saying yesterday that an eventual deal would not include NATO membership for the Ukrainians, that U.S. troops would not be part of a peacekeeping force, that the security guarantees would not come to the Americans. Instead, it would come from the Europeans.

So it certainly appears to a lot of the Europeans and to the Ukrainians that Russia is starting with a leg up here. And I can tell you that the conversations the next few days between the Americans, the Ukrainians and the Europeans are going to be focused on essentially two major buckets.

What is the security assistance? What are the weapons that Ukraine is going to continue getting from the United States and what are they going to have to pay for those weapons? There's been a lot of talk about rare earth minerals that the U.S. wants to get their hands on inside Ukraine. And then what are the security guarantees?

We now appear to -- we now are hearing from the U.S. side that there will not be a NATO guarantee. There won't be what's known as an Article 5 guarantee if Russia chooses to attack Ukraine in the future.

So what does that look like? And you can be certain that Ukrainians and the Europeans are going to be lobbying Vice President Vance, Secretary Rubio and others to make sure that that flow of weapons continues and that there is some kind of guarantee in place that if this deal is struck, that Russia cannot just turn around again in a few years and attack Ukraine again -- Boris, Brianna.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Alex, thank you. And Daniel Dale, our fact checker is with us now. Daniel, where would you like to start?

DANIEL DALE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, Mitch McConnell had polio. I've never heard anyone question that until President Trump did today. Is that a conspiracy theory that even existed before today? I don't know. That was something.

SANCHEZ: Before you go on, Daniel, let's provide some context for our viewers. I don't think we've touched on that yet. We actually have the sound bite here.

President Trump was asked by Kaitlan Collins, I believe, CNN chief White House correspondent, whether Trump was questioning if Mitch McConnell had polio, something that he's been open about and has spoken in favor of vaccines and how they aided him. Let's listen to that interaction.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Sir, we saw Robert F. Kennedy Jr. get confirmed. He's going to come in here and be sworn in.

Mitch McConnell has now voted against several of your nominees. He voted against RFK Jr. as the next health secretary, citing conspiracy theories. What's your reaction to that?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, I feel sorry for Mitch. And I was one of the people that led -- he couldn't -- he wanted to go to the end and he wanted to stay leader. He wasn't -- he's not equipped mentally. He wasn't equipped 10 years ago, mentally, in my opinion. He'd let the Republican Party go to hell if I didn't come along the Republican Party wouldn't even exist right now. Mitch McConnell never really had it. He had an ability to raise money because of his position as leader, which anybody could do. You could do it even. And that's saying a lot.

But the fact is that he raised money and he gave a lot of money to senators. And so he had a little loyalty based on the fact that as leader, you could raise a lot of money.

Senators would call me and they say he wants to give me twenty, twenty five million. Can I take it? I'd say take the money, take the money. But he -- so he engendered a certain amount of -- I don't even call it loyalty. He, you know, was able to get votes. But I was the one that got him to drop out of the leadership position.

[15:35:00]

So he can't love me. But he's not voting against Bobby. He's voting against me. But that's all right. He endorsed me. Do you know that Mitch endorsed me? Right. You think that was easy.

What?

COLLINS: He had polio, obviously. And I don't know.

TRUMP: I don't know anything about he had polio. He had polio.

COLLING: Are you doubting that he had polio?

TRUMP: I have no idea if he had polio. All I can tell you about him is that he shouldn't have been a leader. He knows that. He voted against Bobby. He votes against almost everything now. He's, you know, a very bitter guy. And we have a very strong party. And he's almost not even really a very powerful member.

I'd say he's not. He's lost his power. And it's affected his vote. And, you know, it's one of those things.

But in the meantime, Bobby did great, got more votes than anybody thought. And I think he's going to do phenomenally, just phenomenally in that position.

And everybody else likewise did well, not only well, they got more votes than ...

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: All right, so that was the moment that we were talking about where Trump appeared to cast doubts on whether Mitch McConnell had had polio, Daniel Dale. He did.

DALE: Yes, he, he did. He's talked about it for decades. And that was just one of the claims I think that are worth fact checking. KEILAR: Daniel, I'm so sorry, I keep interrupting you. But I do just want to let our viewers know you're watching the swearing in of RFK Jr. for HHS secretary as we're watching this. Sorry, Daniel, go ahead.

DALE: No problem. So President Trump repeated this claim that he won the youth vote by 36 points over former Vice President Harris. He did not win the youth vote at all. Harris won it. Let alone Trump winning by 36. Repeated, of course, his usual lie about the rigged 2020 election, which he lost fair and square legitimately.

And then he repeated this more important claim, I think now that the U.S. has provided hundreds of billions more aid to Ukraine than European countries have collectively. According to a German think tank that studies this issue closely, it is Europe that has provided tens of billions more aid than the U.S. had, both in terms of committed aid and the aid that's actually been allocated. So that's a reversal of reality from President Trump. He said we had no Middle East problem when he left office. I mean, that's a come on.

We had an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, U.S. troops in Iraq. We had U.S. troops in Syria. We had a civil war in Syria and Yemen. So just nonsense there.

He also suggested that China had been open to denuclearization when he was president the first time. He's certainly privy to much more. You know, he has conversations with China that I'm not privy to. But in public, at least, China forcefully rejected even being part of the talks that the U.S. was having with Russia, saying that it had such a small arsenal, China, that it didn't need to be involved.

And then, finally, he blamed the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, among other things, on President Biden supposedly saying that Ukraine could join NATO.

Again, I don't know what Biden was saying privately, but he never explicitly said that Ukraine was anywhere close to joining NATO. He left the door open to it, but repeatedly made clear to the Ukrainians, guys, that Ukraine, in his view, was far away from being able to join the alliance.

KEILAR: Yes, he said it was in their hands, meaning that they needed to show that they were ready to be a part of the organization.

SANCHEZ: Precisely. Daniel Dale, thank you so much for breaking that down for us. We have to take a quick break. We'll keep breaking down the latest from the Oval Office when we come back.

[15:40:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: We're following breaking news in the legal battle between thousands of federal workers and the Trump administration. A judge just moments ago extending a pause on the administration's dismantling of USAID. It's an early test of just how far President Trump can push his executive powers, firing federal employees and shuttering full agencies in a mission to crack down on government spending.

KEILAR: The thing is, though, the damage may already be done here. Many of those USAID workers, they left scrambling from dangerous global hotspots, unsure what comes next. They're afraid for their safety even.

One agency diplomat telling CNN, quote, We feel like psychological warfare is being waged against us.

Joining us now is Jeremy Konyndyk. He's a former senior USAID official who led the global disaster response under President Obama and the COVID-19 response under President Biden. He's now the president of Refugees International. Your reaction just to this ruling?

JEREMY KONYNDYK, FORMER SENIOR USAID OFFICIAL: Well, I think it's good to see that the judge still is not buying the government's arguments. You know, the government has been trying to claim that they are doing this lawfully and appropriately. That's not at all the case.

They are doing this almost entirely outside of any sort of legal bounds, any sort of required processes. You know, what it is doing, as the plaintiffs argued and as you referenced just a moment ago, is really putting USAID personnel in harm's way. One of the really striking affidavits that's been filed in that case talks about people who were being evacuated out of Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, after there was significant unrest in town.

And as they were being evacuated, they weren't sure if they still had jobs. They weren't sure if they would be supported when they come back. Normally, when U.S. personnel are pulled out of an unsafe overseas post, they get support when they come back.

[15:45:00]

Here, they were just dumped in a hotel for two days, not sure if they had jobs, not sure if they would have anywhere to go after those two days. It's really unconscionable how they're being treated.

SANCHEZ: Jeremy, I do wonder how you think this legal fight wraps up, because if it winds up in the hands of the Supreme Court, this is a court that, as you've seen, is willing to buck with precedent. Do you think they would hand President Trump, the executive in this case, the sort of powers that allow him to transcend congressional appropriations?

KONYNDYK: Well, this is the huge question in this case and some of the other legal challenges. You know, he is rather than trying to follow the law or change the law, he is proceeding to try and ignore the law and then basically dare the courts and dare Congress to see if they can stop him. I hope he does not get away with that, both because that would be very damaging in this case for USAID and for the many, many people abroad who depend on USAID and the many Americans who are made safe for every day by USAID's work.

But it also raises really troubling questions about the Constitution. If a president can choose to ignore the law and if the courts ultimately let him get away with that, we are in a very dangerous place.

KEILAR: So tell us what this has meant in real terms with the work USAID does and the work that its nonprofit partners do.

KONYNDYK: So what it has meant in real terms is people beginning to die from deprivation of services. In a hearing in Congress this morning, Congressman Brad Sherman talked about a patient who had been discharged from an NGO clinic, a refugee who had been pushed out of a clinic due to the stop work orders from the State Department. And when they were deprived of their medical treatment, they died soon after that.

This is killing people. It's not hypothetical. It's happening.

That will happen on a much, much larger scale the longer that this goes on. The longer that critical life-saving humanitarian services are disrupted, the more people will be harmed by this. And based on what we heard from some of the members of Congress this morning, I think they don't fully grasp yet just how much damage is being done right now.

They're kind of buying the line that the critical life-saving programs are exempted, when in practice they're not.

SANCHEZ: I wonder if you think that some of these programs from USAID and its mission have become almost parodied, and their efforts exaggerated by members of Congress. Because we hear these stories about condoms to Hamas and that sort of thing. But then there are also pieces of information coming out about DEI programs in Eastern Europe, for example.

How much of it do you think is valid, and do you think that USAID had programs or money spent that could have been funneled in a different direction?

KONYNDYK: Look, priorities change every time an administration changes. When I came in, I came in on the day one team with Biden at USAID. There were things we shut down and we changed.

Fully expect that that would have happened in a normal transition here, too. That's not really what's going on, though. What's going on here are kind of, you know, there's three categories.

There's outright lies, like the Gaza condom story, which even Elon Musk admitted earlier this week was not true, despite him having pushed it for a week. There are things that are accurate but not actually USAID programs, like some of the things that we've heard about the so-called transgender opera, which was actually a State Department cultural diplomacy payment, not anything to do with USAID.

And then there are things that are just being completely misunderstood and mischaracterized. So there's been a lot of mockery of USAID funding circumcision programs. Well, the reason that USAID does that is to prevent HIV, because voluntary circumcision can reduce HIV transmission risk by two-thirds. It's an incredibly cost-effective way to slow HIV transmission. So there's a very good reason to invest in that kind of a program.

And, you know, this is why it's really not good to make federal policy through Elon Musk's Twitter feed, because you lose all of that. You lose all contact with reality when that is what's driving the narrative.

KEILAR: Yes. Jeremy Konyndyk, thank you so much. We appreciate you being with us.

KONYNDYK: Thank you.

KEILAR: Today's ruling on USAID is another example of federal courts pumping the brakes as the Trump administration tries to quickly downsize the government. The president and some of his allies accusing federal judges of overreach and political bias.

SANCHEZ: Joining us to discuss is retired New York State Supreme Court Judge Jill Konviser and former Miami-Dade County Court Judge Jeff Swartz. Thank you both for being with us. Judge Konviser, Elon Musk posted a poll on X asking whether, quote, federal judges who repeatedly abuse their authority to obstruct the will of the people via their elected representatives should be impeached.

[15:50:02]

Do you think judges feel pressure from these kinds of polls being put on social media?

JILL KONVISER, RETIRED NEW YORK STATE SUPREME COURT JUDGE: I'm not sure if pressure is the exact word I would use. It's certainly inexcusable and troubling. But I don't think federal judges care so much precisely what Mr. Musk might say. Judges, federal judges call balls and strikes every day. They deal with difficult litigants. They deal with those accused and convicted of crimes.

I don't think they're that terribly worried about it. But I think what the issue is that is concerning and what Mr. Musk probably doesn't understand is how to impeach someone. There has to be a reason. It's not by fiat and it's not by executive order. So I think he probably needs a better understanding of what that means. It has to be grounds for impeachment, which he has not alleged.

KEILAR: And Judge Schwartz, we heard the House Speaker Mike Johnson saying the court should take a, quote, step back to let the Trump administration work its will. I just wonder what your reaction is to that when we're talking about co-equal branches of government, which is something that normally the speaker is in support of.

JEFF SWARTZ, FORMER MIAMI-DADE COUNTY COURT JUDGE: Well, I would say this. Judges, whether they're elected or appointed, have no constituency. They are not loyal to one party or the other.

They are not there, as the justice said, they are there to call balls and strikes. They're there to determine what is or is not legal under the Constitution. Their job is -- their constituency is the law and only the law. I learned a long time ago that half the people that left my courtroom weren't really very happy with me because they lost. Losing does not mean a judge is incompetent. It does not mean that the judge is crooked.

And I think Mr. Musk really has no understanding of our Constitution. I know he knows some things because he became a naturalized citizen, but he literally has no understanding of the Constitution in this country and how it works, and that makes him even more dangerous.

SANCHEZ: Judge Swartz, I wonder if there's much that can be done if they ultimately decide to ignore court orders, whether it's Musk's DOGE or President Trump.

SWARTZ: That is, to me, the nightmare scenario. That is, in my opinion -- and this happened in 1830. Andrew Jackson was quoted as saying when there was a ruling against him, if the Chief Justice wants to enforce his order, let him come down here with his army.

Judges don't have armies. We operate in this country on the respect for the law. And if there is no respect for the law by the leadership of this country, it is basically meant to destroy the third branch of government, that which has the most control over the executive, check on the executive and on Congress for doing more than they're permitted to do.

And if that happens, that's a nightmare scenario. That's the real constitutional crisis.

KEILAR: Trump has said he'll abide by the courts, but that he'll appeal. But certainly when you have Elon Musk tweeting like this, you have J.D. Vance tweeting, raising questions about what they'll do when judges hand down decisions they don't like. Big questions that have to be answered here.

Judge Konviser, something else I want to ask you about, though, something that just happened minutes ago, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, resigned. She didn't say why she was doing this, but she certainly was under a lot of pressure to dismiss criminal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams after being directed to do so earlier this week. A directive that wasn't about the merits of the case against him, but DOJ citing the need for Adams to be able to cooperate with the Trump immigration crackdown.

What's your reaction to this?

KONVISER: Well, first of all, I did read the indictment against Mayor Adams, and there was significant teeth to it. A federal indictment, unlike a state indictment, will list every overt act that's alleged in the case. And I think it's been clear to any even casual observer that Mayor Adams has been running after President Trump and courting his support for an obvious reason. He didn't want to face the music.

And it only looks to me that the interim U.S. attorney, Ms. Sassoon, probably was saying, you know, sort of realizing that what Trump was doing and the Justice Department was doing under Trump's tutelage was to completely obliterate her independent role as a prosecutor. There's a reason why the Southern District of New York is referred to as the sovereign district of New York, because they have been independent.

[15:55:00]

She probably couldn't. She wouldn't do it. And if that's the reason, my hat's off to her. Good for her.

SANCHEZ: Judges --

SWARTZ: I'd like to add a couple of things. Can I add a couple of things on that? I don't mean to interrupt, but the word comes down --

SANCHEZ: We only have a few seconds.

SWARTZ: OK, the letter that came down from Bove telling her that she should resign or that she was fired. You need to know that he also threatened to have her and her staff internally investigated for whatever they did involving the Adams case.

SANCHEZ: Wow.

SANCHEZ: Judges Konviser and Swartz, thank you both so much. Stay with CNN. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: To the millennials out there, this next story, it's like that movie Homeward Bound, but it's for reals. This 10-month-old puppy named Aurora got lost in deep snow in Malone, New York for 34 hours. Temperatures there were below freezing.

Help was on the way, though.

SANCHEZ: I would legit die if I was stuck out there for 34 hours in those conditions. Retired detective Chad Tavernia used a drone with a heat signal that he detected in a cornfield almost four miles away. Speaking to Aurora's dad over the phone, Chad was able to guide him to her location. You see her there wagging her tail. Here's the moment they were reunited.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You got her. You got her, buddy. Awesome.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: Oh, and you hear the emotion there in his voice. Here is Aurora and her parents after her snowy adventure.

KEILAR: That's right. So she was hungry. She was cold. She did have one little deer tick on her, but otherwise she was doing pretty well. And how did all of this happen, you may ask? Well, she lost her way after her electric fence collar battery died.

[16:00:04]

SANCHEZ: She is so cute.

KEILAR: She's adorable. You're going to get lost in those puppy dog eyes.

SANCHEZ: 100 percent. I'm doing it right now. It would be so heart- wrenching to lose your pet that way and not be able to find them. We're fortunate that retired detective Chad Tavernia is out there with his heat-seeking drone.

KEILAR: Yes, he specializes in this. What an awesome dude. Love it.

SANCHEZ: Hey, thank you so much for joining us today. "THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts right now.

END