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New Video Appears to Show Moment Airliner Crashes in Iran; John Kerry Discusses Iran Crisis, Soleimani Killing, Iran Nuclear Deal, Biden Campaign, Presidential Race. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired January 10, 2020 - 14:30   ET

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

[14:30:00]

GREG FEITH, FORMER NTSB SENIOR AIR SAFETY INVESTIGATOR: This airplane was in pieces coming down. That doesn't happen in a normal engine failure or even with an engine fire, as they've alluded to.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: These families, everyone on board, 176 people were killed.

Greg Feith, thank you so much. Awful.

FEITH: You're welcome, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Just in, as the administration deals with credibility issues over the intelligence in the Soleimani strike, the president now changing the story again. Hear what he's now saying after claiming the Iranian general was targeting a U.S. embassy.

Plus, former Secretary of State John Kerry joins me live. Stay here.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: As long as I'm president of the United States, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: President Trump there making that vow just a few days ago when he addressed the nation in the wake of that strike that killed Iran General Qasem Soleimani.

My next guest says, if that is President Trump's goal, then he should never have pulled out of the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a deal my next guest helped negotiate.

[14:35:04]

Former Secretary of State John Kerry joins me now there in Iowa.

Mr. Secretary, nice to have you on, sir. Welcome.

JOHN KERRY, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Happy to be with you. Thank you very much.

BALDWIN: So, Secretary Kerry, the Trump White House has offered multiple reasons for why killing Soleimani was necessary, including that he was apparently planning to attack U.S. embassies.

But when you listen to several lawmakers, you know, they're now publicly stating that that's not what they were told in those briefings this week.

I want to play some sound for you, sir. Take a listen to one of them. This is Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono and then Secretary of State Pompeo for just this morning. Here you go.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE POMPEO, SECRETARY OF STATE: We have specific information on an imminent threat, and those threats included attacks on U.S. embassies, period, full stop.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump claimed that Soleimani was actively planning new attacks and looking at attacking U.S. embassies, not just in Baghdad. Did you see intelligence saying that?

SEN. MAZIE HIRONO (D-HI): No. So this is an example of the president embellishing as he goes. I have no idea where he got that from.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Moments ago, in an interview with FOX News, President Trump said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS HOST, "THE INGRAHAM ANGLE": Don't the American people have a right to know what specifically was targeted without revealing methods and sources?

TRUMP: Well, I don't think so, but we will tell you that probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad.

INGRAHAM: Large-scale attacks planned for other embassies and, if those were planned, why can't we reveal that to the American people? Wouldn't that help your case?

TRUMP: I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: So the president now claims four embassies were targeted after previously saying one. He has offered no proof on any of these claims and is going further than his national security aides.

So, Secretary Kerry, is this administration credible?

KERRY: Well, I think everybody in the country understands the president has consistently either not told the truth or embellished what he said. And you hear from Senators and members of Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, that they did not hear any of this, this was not part of the briefing.

And of course, the American people have a right, through their representatives, to know what the basis of an attack is.

But more importantly, if the president, he started out his speech yesterday saying that Iran will not get a nuke weapon, well, if he hadn't pulled out of the agreement, that would be one promise that he actually had already kept because they didn't have one, and they weren't about to get one, and they couldn't get one without the United States knowing it or any of our allies at the same time.

We have 13 years in front of us before there was any shift at all in what Iran was allowed to do or not allowed to do. Thirteen years during which this administration could have been negotiating the follow-on agreements, Yemen, Hezbollah, missiles, arms trafficking. All of that was available to be negotiated. Now, there's no negotiation at all.

And in fact, the president of the United States farmed out to another country, Iran, the decision as to whether or not we would have been at war. If Iran had hit Americans, if they had attacked more broadly, then you know the president would have been in a position to have to respond.

So whether or not we're at war was, in fact, determined more by the Iranian response and the killing of their general than it was by a decision that Congress and the United States made itself. That's disgraceful, and it's simply unacceptable.

BALDWIN: On the strike itself, Democrats, Republicans, they agree that general Soleimani was a terrorist, right? That he had blood on his hands. But still, is it acceptable to kill --

(CROSSTALK)

KERRY: Of course, he did.

BALDWIN: Is it acceptable to kill the top military leader of a country without being formally at war?

KERRY: Well, that gets very complicated in the context of international law and what judgment you can make. The president does have a right, if there's an imminent attack or some exigent reason for moving to take steps to protect the United States of America.

The question here is whether or not there was anything imminent, whether or not there was anything gained by this that could not have been gained in a different way.

And I think, you know, nobody -- and I resent the notion that he and others in the Republican Party are trying to say that it's Democrats, who are raising the legitimacy of this judgment, are somehow --

BALDWIN: Soft. KERRY: -- you know, opposed to the idea that Soleimani himself should

be eliminated from this earth. We're not. Nobody has said that.

[14:40:03]

Everybody understands that Soleimani has blood on his hands of Americans. And nobody's mourning the fact, just bluntly, that he's dead.

But they are upset by exactly what I just described. That the subsequent events that flow from that kind of a choice were sufficient that Republican and Democrat presidents alike previously, who had the option, did not think it was worth taking that risk.

President Trump has been reckless, impulsive, does this on his own, likes to think it makes him look tough, but it actually has shut the door to the kind of diplomacy, in many cases, that could have and should have flowed from any action that we took, number one.

Number two, as I said, farmed out a decision of what comes next to relying on a regime that we don't like and don't trust to actually behave in a rational way. And that's dangerous.

And, moreover, the president has alienated our allies, the people who have been trying to stay in this agreement because they know that the agreement is sound, and it's working.

And they believe that the president has really shut the door to the kinds of diplomacy that could actually advance America's interests and make America safer.

BALDWIN: Mr. Secretary, on the JCPOA, you know, when you were watching President Trump earlier this week there standing at the White House, he -- he said it was the Obama administration who essentially paid for those Iranian missiles that were aimed at Americans.

And then your successor, Mike Pompeo, was asked about that and about you on FOX News, and this is what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

POMPEO: They had the resources. They had the ability to build out the militias in Syria, to underwrite Hezbollah, to build a missile program. All the things that we are now confronting are a direct result of the resources that the regime had available as a result of that terrible nuclear --

(CROSSTALK)

INGRAHAM: By the way, John Kerry admitted in 2016 that this could be an eventuality with the money being used. So he already spilled the beans on that a couple of years ago.

POMPEO: He knew that risk, and it's now come to fruition.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BALDWIN: Your response to the secretary?

KERRY: Well, the president lied about that because we didn't give $150 billion. They didn't get anything near that.

What they got, in a totally separate arrangement, totally separate was the settlement of a lawsuit where they won and they were accruing interest.

And the average taxpayer of America was actually having to pay more and more and more interest to the Iranians for the fact that they had won this lawsuit, and they were going to get more money.

We gave them a little bit of money that was released in that period of time, not as part of the nuclear arrangement.

But the fact is the IRGC had all the money it wanted. The IRGC wasn't starving at that point in time. And, in fact, Iran owed billions upon billions of dollars. Most of that money went to pay off their debts and to facilitate their economic initiatives.

So it's just not true that that money specifically directly went to the IRGC. Money is fungible in any budget. The IRGC had its funding. They had its missiles long before we made any kind of arrangement with Iran.

BALDWIN: Do you believe Iran when they say that retaliation is over? Do you believe this sequence has ended?

KERRY: I think there's going to be ongoing tension with Iran for some period of time, until there's a legitimate negotiation that arrives at a new arrangement for the security of the region.

That is what was available to this administration when we left office. They were prepared to negotiate. Other countries in the region were prepared to negotiate.

In fact, the arrangement was such that there was an opening to be able to negotiate about Yemen, try to find peace in Yemen, deal with their missile programs, and other issues. And Iran had made it crystal clear to us they were prepared to negotiate on all of that once the nuclear ban was in place.

The nuclear ban has now been in place. Iran was living by the agreement. They were prepared to move forward. And this administration unilaterally, because it was done by Obama -- the president just keeps moving away from anything done by Obama -- he decided to get out.

And by getting out, he has isolated himself from our own allies. China and Russia are not allies. But China and Russia worked hard to keep this agreement alive. Europe, our allies, Germany, France, and Britain all worked to keep the agreement alive. They knew it was working.

[14:45:03]

And it was only after the president pulled out that ships in the gulf began to be threatened, that we had our embassy under attack recently, and all of these other bad things have begun to happen, all of which were foreseeable and were foreseen. Everybody predicted this is exactly where it goes.

Why do I say that? Because it's where we were before we got into the negotiations with Iran. They were two months away from being able to break out a nuclear weapon. They'd already mastered the nuclear fuel cycle. And what we did was contain that.

They destroyed facilities. They joined into the agreement. And only Donald Trump broke it apart and brought about this confrontation.

BALDWIN: One more quickly, Mr. Secretary, then I want to take a commercial break. But something you just said, you know, the fact that this president brings up former President Barack Obama as much as he does. Why do you think he seems obsessed with the man?

KERRY: I can't answer that. It has to do with his character and a lot of other things. You'd have to talk to people who are professional psychiatrists or others. I'm sure they have answers for it.

BALDWIN: Secretary of State, stay with me. So much more to discuss.

As we mentioned, you are in Waterloo, Iowa. We'll talk about the 2020 race. We'll talk about the former vice president coming up. We'll pick this conversation up after a quick commercial break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:50:49]

BALDWIN: And we're back. Former Secretary of State John Kerry is back with me.

As we noted, sir, you are in Iowa out on the trail with former Vice President Joe Biden. And specifically, here we're talking about this, you know, foreign policy experience, his decades in Washington, as the reason that he can beat Donald Trump.

But his rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, told CNN this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. DOUG COLLINS (D-GA): One, they're in love with terrorists. We see that. They mourn Soleimani more than they mourn our Gold Star families who are the ones who suffered under Soleimani.

NIKKI HALEY, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.: The only ones --

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT): Joe Biden voted and helped lead the effort for the war in Iraq, the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in the modern history of this country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: So, Secretary Kerry, in your "New York Times" piece, you know, you wrote about the divisions over Vietnam and Iraq. You wrote about tearing at the fabric of this nation. Why doesn't Senator Sanders have a point?

KERRY: Because Joe Biden, like a lot of people who voted during that period of time, did not actually vote for the war. He voted for a process that was supposed to be put in place, that was supposed to build that international coalition, exhaust the opportunities of diplomacy, and not rush to war without consultation and so forth.

Almost every one of those things were not done, and there was with a rush to war. It turned out, obviously, to be a mistake for all those of us who trusted in the words that we were told and in the process that we were told would be there. So lesson learned. But it wasn't a vote simply to go to war.

In fact, Joe Biden worked with Dick Lugar to try to have an alternative process that would have required additional input from Congress. So I just don't accept that the criticism, per se.

I think vice president's judgment, along the road, on any number of issues. The leader when Bill Clinton was president of the efforts to try to get the Clinton administration to hold the Balkans accountable and be able to get a peace process in place, which ultimately was put in place and came about.

I think -- I could think of any number of things, on arms control agreements and many others, where I haven't necessarily -- not only necessarily. None of the other people who are running were involved in those kinds of efforts over the years that made a difference to the lives of people all over the world in making the world safer, nuclear arms control and many other things.

So I just -- I find that Joe Biden's breadth of experience and leadership with any number of issues, from the Violence Against Women Act to the assault weapons ban to arms control agreements to pushing an administration to make peace where it didn't want to initially be involved, I think those things will really ring strongly against the other candidacies in this race.

That's why I'm here. I believe Joe Biden is the only person who has the set of relationships around the world, who has had this unbelievable breadth of experience as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and then as vice president for eight years. An administration, by the way, which never had a whiff of scandal.

And so, you know, to me -- and then you look at the head-to-head confrontations around the country, in state after state, where we might not be competitive otherwise, Joe Biden is the one that consistently beats the president or is tied with him.

And I believe that when he becomes the nominee and the party unites behind him, there will be a broad recognition in the country of the difference between the qualities that Joe Biden brings to the table versus the impulsivity and recklessness of our current president.

BALDWIN: Secretary Kerry, thank you for your time. Safe travels there in Iowa.

KERRY: Great to be with you. Thank you.

BALDWIN: Thank you.

KERRY: Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

[14:55:01]

BALDWIN: Be sure to tune in next Tuesday night here on CNN for the last Democratic presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses. It's at 8:00 Eastern time right here on CNN.

Still ahead here, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now ready to hand over those articles of impeachment to the Senate, saying it will happen next week. All the new details just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:59:56]

BALDWIN: We continue on. Top of the hour on this Friday afternoon. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thank you for being with me.