Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

White House Faces Storm Over Iran Intel As Impeachment Trial Looms; Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) Preparing To Send Impeachment Articles To Senate. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired January 13, 2020 - 10:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:00:00]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: It is the top of the hour. Good morning, everyone. I'm Poppy Harlow.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto.

After weeks facing pressure from all sides, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is getting ready to send articles of impeachment of this president to the Senate. The White House says it is prepared, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could move to quickly dismiss the articles, not clear he has the votes for that. Pelosi warning such a move would be, in her words, a cover-up.

HARLOW: Also this morning, a credibility crisis at the White House. The president says Iran targeted four U.S. embassies which led to taking out Iran's top general, Qasem Soleimani. But not only are top White House officials struggling to back up that claim, that belief with any specific intelligence. Some are publicly admitting there was not that specific threat per se.

Let's begin with the impeachment articles. Our CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju is on Capitol Hill. So I know they're meeting tomorrow. Any word on the timing here?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, yes. Tomorrow morning, Nancy Pelosi is meeting with her caucus, they're going to discuss the next steps. We do expect there actually will be a formal vote to name the impeachment managers, people who will prosecute the case in the Senate and that would lead to the transferring of the articles of impeachment over to the Senate. We do expect that vote to occur probably on Wednesday, it could be as early as tomorrow. But the speaker has yet to make that formal announcement.

And after that vote is made, to name those impeachment managers, to then eventually leading to the articles being sent to the Senate, that's when some of the procedural steps would take place, swearing in of senators, chief justice being sworn in, presiding over the Senate, and then we'll see opening arguments begin probably by early next week. And then the Democrats will make their case and the president's defense team will make their case as they try to push to get the president acquitted.

Now, what Nancy Pelosi is arguing in the run-up to all of this, is she is saying that any efforts to simply try to dismiss these charges in her view amounts to a cover-up.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): He signed on, on Thursday, to a resolution to dismiss the case. Dismissing is a cover-up. Dismissing is a cover- up. If they want to go that route, again, the senators who are thinking now about voting for witnesses or not, they will have to be accountable for not having a fair trial.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: She is initially referring to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader.

McConnell has said that the issue in discussion about witnesses, that will have to occur after the arguments will take place, after senators ask questions, the impeachment manager, the Democratic side, and to the defense team, then they will have votes to try to subpoena witnesses, Democrats are going to force those votes.

The ultimate question is whether or not there will be enough Republicans joining with Democrats, they need four to break ranks, Democrats, in order to get the witnesses subpoenaed. But at the moment, guys, uncertain whether they have those four votes, unlikely at this point, but certainly things could change as that trial begins. Guys?

SCIUTTO: Manu Raju on the Hill, thank you very much.

Let's speak more about this with CNN Political Analyst Molly Ball.

And, Molly, you wrote -- this is a big picture question here, really, because the president almost certainly is not going to be removed from office, two-thirds vote in the Senate, so it becomes what are the political consequences of this, particularly in an election year.

You've written that Pelosi's decision to go down the impeachment path here was a gamble. And there are signs it's rallying the president's base, he's fundraising off of it. Where does it stand today as we head into this trial? Risks for speaker Pelosi, risks for the Democrats?

MOLLY BALL, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Absolutely. Well, the risk is primarily political, that's the terms we've mostly been talking about it, although, of course, the speaker and the Democrats have tried to say that they do not consider this to be a political process. But, look, in the climactic sort of confrontation between two very tactical and stubborn leaders, Speaker Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, Mitch McConnell won this round. She folded and she has, despite having said she wanted to see something on paper before she was going to send the articles over, she now appears prepared to appoint managers despite not knowing what she termed the arena that she was going to send them into. So it will be interesting to see where she goes, even people quite close to the speaker say that she hasn't made up her mind on who those managers would be and she's holding her cards quite close going into that caucus meeting tomorrow, where there is going to be, you know, a family discussion among the Democrats of exactly what form this takes going forward.

But very soon, the ball will be in Mitch McConnell's court, and as Manu was saying, there is a lot up in the air about how he will proceed.

[10:05:00]

HARLOW: Molly, one thing that you write about is an effort that just doesn't get as much attention but is important, and that is using the House General Counsel to rein in the president through the courts. Is it working?

BALL: Well, yes and no. The Democrats say that they have gotten a series of favorable court decisions. They have been winning most of those cases and the speaker and the House Counsel's Office have selected those cases very carefully because they want to establish legal precedence that not only that they win, but that protect the institution of the House and protect the separation of powers what they see as the important checks and balances in the Constitution.

But the president's strategy has been not only to completely stonewall and, in the view of the House obstruct, but also to appeal and appeal and appeal, so even when in cases like, you know, for the president's financial records, tax returns and other in the cases like with Don McGahn and some of the subpoenas, even when the House has been winning those cases, they are still on appeal, they will probably all have to go all the way to the Supreme Court, the wheels of justice grind very slowly and the court won't hear any of these until at least the spring and it could be after the election before some of these very consequential separation of powers issues are finally decided. That, of course, would be too late at least for the political purposes of affecting the election.

SCIUTTO: Well, there has been some good reporting on deliberately slow walking some of these decisions here. Some of those judges, it seems, could have acted more quickly on it.

On the question of senators, hearing from witnesses, Susan Collins of Maine says that she's working on a plan for witnesses in the Senate trial. She would be potentially one of those three, four Republican votes necessary to do that. A realistic effort there, likely to succeed?

BALL: Well, I think that's what we're all waiting to find out. There are a lot of very active discussions among Senate Republicans, not among the majority of Senate Republicans. Most of them have said that they have seen all they need to see to make up their minds, but there are a few of those Senate Republicans who are having these active discussions and I don't think they have decided which way they're going to go. And it's very interesting to me. I think the most significant fact here is that despite all of the things that Mitch McConnell has said about essentially having prejudged this case, he has not closed the door entirely on this question of witnesses. He has said that it will be -- it will wait until another phase of that Senate trial, but he has not closed the door. So he is potentially leaving room for if that coalition of whatever kind of gang is to come together, to take those votes, there is at least the door is ajar for that.

HARLOW: Molly Ball, thank you very much.

Overnight, Iranians in the streets of Tehran protesting the government after it admitted to shooting down that Ukrainian passenger plane with a missile, killing all 176 people on board.

Riot police firing tear gas into the crowds and this new disturbing video in to CNN, wounded protesters being carried away, witnesses claiming security forces are using live ammunition, Jim. Iran's government denying that.

SCIUTTO: Back here at home, there is this question, what was the intelligence that led to the killing of Soleimani, the Trump administration scrambling, sometimes contradicting itself about the intelligence which led to this decision. Two top national security officials have declined to cite specific evidence to back up President Trump's claim, one of them even on the Sunday shows seemed to admit there wasn't such specific intelligence. Have a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK ESPER, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: He said he believed that they probably, that they could have been targeting the embassies in the region.

He didn't cite a specific piece of evidence. What he says he probably he believed --

MARGARET BRENNAN, CBS NEWS HOST: Are you saying there wasn't one?

ESPER: I didn't see one with regard to four embassies.

ROBERT O'BRIEN, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: We had exquisite intelligence. And the intelligence show that they were looking at U.S. facilities throughout the region and they wanted to inflict casualties on American soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, as well as diplomats. The threat was imminent. I saw the intelligence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Mike Rogers, former House intelligence chairman. Mike, you've seen a lot of intelligence at difficult and crucial times here. Probably, could have been, he believed, is that exquisite intelligence that indicates an imminent attack?

MIKE ROGERS, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CONTRIBUTOR: Probably not. I mean, I think when the national security adviser uses the term, exquisite, what I think he's referring to is the fact that a piece of intelligence came from either a source where not many people would have access to that information, meaning that source was very, very close to the inner circle of Soleimani and/or same with signals intelligence, they were able to get a connection very close so they're getting real-time kind of intelligence. That's normally when I hear someone say it was exquisite, it means, boy, that's not a lot of people ought to know about how we get that information and you have to clean it up a little bit.

[10:10:05]

This -- here's what I -- this is my assessment on this, I'm trying to walk through this, look at it. I think they went down a rabbit hole when they started using the term, imminent. I think what they had was information, if you listen to both Secretary of Defense Esper and the national security adviser, they had information where they were planning to increase activities to kill airmen, sailors, marines and diplomats, meaning, likely government buildings, likely embassies, but they didn't have anything specific, let's say, we're going to get this embassy on this day. That's what I think happened. And if you're not a sophisticated consumer of intelligence, you might walk away and go, well, they were going to kill diplomats. That means say they were attacking embassies and we knew that they were in four different places. That's what I think happened.

HARLOW: So, Chairman Rogers, if that is what happened, play this out for us, if it wasn't imminent then, because that's, I believe, the legal justification needed, right, did he then still have the Article II power to do this? If you assume that the (INAUDIBLE) from the early 2000s don't cover it.

ROGERS: Yes. And here is why I do. And I think we're spending a lot of time parsing small pieces. If you had the fact that, remember, he was also killed with a guy named Muhandis, who was the terrorist leader, by the way, for the Shia militias in Iraq. You had the death of an American caused My muhandis, directed by Soleimani, wounded four soldiers, they're saying we're going to ramp this up, so you don't know if it's yet tomorrow, ten days, or a month. And so the analysts would put together a package trying to encompass all of that information, saying is this real, are they really going to do this, are they really going to try to step up their activity and you have that with opportunity, those two things married up would say, you know, maybe we'd take that shot.

Can I just say one thing? And I think we're going to spend a lot of time on this in Congress as well about pointing fingers and you didn't tell me and all that, there is lots of credibility problems that need to be worked on with Congress and the White House and the White House back to Congress, but something really fascinating is happening in Iran.

And there is an old saying in the army, when the map doesn't match the terrain, always best to go with the terrain. Meaning, things have changed a little bit, clearly with the shooting down of that airline, those protesters that have been really beaten and shot before and disappear, according to the Iranian intelligence services, think about 2009, the Green Movement, few months ago was economic, now they're out in the streets again, this says that that pressure internally is a great opportunity for diplomacy to move forward on getting Iran back to the diplomatic table and still holding out -- I think this is a really important time. I hope Congress spends time saying, all right, this is how we need to move forward versus only looking backwards on this thing. I think it's a rare opportunity, honestly.

SCIUTTO: But, as you know, the president, even in the midst of this pressure campaign on Iran, withdrawing from the deal, he's offered to sit down with the Iranians. They have refused that offer to this point. Of course, that could change. And I think your point about internal pressure makes sense. Would the administration, to make that happen, have to be open to relaxing that economic pressure? Because as you know, that is starving is too strong a word, but it's certainly starving the government and the people of economic resources at this point.

ROGERS: Yes. And part of that, I think, that economic pressure caused those reactions a few months ago that led to a severe crackdown, by the way, led by Soleimani on these people. So I would argue that the president and the administration ought to say, listen, we're going to engage every level of diplomacy. And if you want to talk about economic sanction relief, we'll talk about it, but there is going to have to be some give here and then have our European allies -- I hope all this is happening. I'm an internal optimist at the end of the day. My wife says it's a defect. But I do believe that if we can get our European allies and really step up U.S. diplomacy, even if it's not us, you know, leading that meeting up front but sitting at that table, I think we ought to do it.

This is a very rare opportunity where protesters are now coming out of the woodwork and I think they think their regime is hurt a little bit by this Soleimani activity, like it or not, or did we -- I think that's what you're seeing. And my argument, we should not let this opportunity pass us by and engage diplomacy, continue a real deterrent and see if we can make some progress. I hope that's where everyone is having those discussions.

SCIUTTO: Well, it would be a remarkable turn for this president who has leveled so much criticism against his predecessor for doing exactly that, negotiating. But, listen, presidents have made turns like that before. Mike Rogers --

ROGERS: Did you really think he would step back from the aggression? I'm not sure I did when he was tweeting if you respond, we'll respond tenfold.

[10:15:02]

He did do that. So this gives me hope that there is a path forward on this, yes.

SCIUTTO: One thing we've learned of this President is don't -- you know, don't be surprised if you're surprised. Mike Rogers, thanks very much. Still to come this hour, should witnesses testify at President Trump's impeachment trial? I'm going to speak to a Republican congressman about that very question and the broader showdown in the Senate.

Plus, Elizabeth Warren says that she has been friends with Bernie Sanders forever. But now, his campaign is on the attack. That's changing that relationship.

HARLOW: And later, a veteran who lost his legs in Iraq opens up about his personal battle against Iranian -- Iran's late General Qasem Soleimani. He'll be here with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:20:00]

SCIUTTO: The White House facing two brewing crises at the moment, Iran and impeachment. With me now, Republican Congressman and Iraq War Veteran Van Taylor of Texas. Congressman, thank, so much for taking the time.

You were an intelligence officer in the marines. I want to play for you how the defense secretary described the intelligence leading up to the Soleimani strike and get your reaction to it. Have a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRENNAN: Probably and could have been, that is -- that sounds more like an assessment than a specific tangible threat with a decisive piece of intelligence.

ESPER: Well, the president didn't say that there was a tangible -- he didn't cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said is he -- probably, he believed

BRENNAN: Are you saying there wasn't one?

ESPER: I didn't see one with regard to four embassies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Probably, believed, could have been, you dealt with a lot of intelligence in your time, is that an imminent threat?

REP. VAN TAYLOR (R-TX): Well, let me say thank you for having me on. I served in the Marine Corps, you know, was an intelligence officer, worked in a secret compartmentalized facility for a living for a while there, and in Iraq, one of the first platoon in Iraq from my brigade, and we collected intelligence to bring back to the general --

SCIUTTO: Intelligence in those circumstances, that could be a life or death question.

TAYLOR: Absolutely. There's no question that it can be life or death. And, you know, when you're dealing with information, you want to get as much as you can that's going to be accurate and credible. I went to the classified briefings last week ad left with no doubt in my mind there was an imminent threat, that the president of the United States did the right thing. And I think the question to ask ourselves is, you know, did he have the authority, the legal authority to kill a combatant on the battlefield. And I think the authorization of military force passed in 2002 gave the president of the United States the authority to do that.

SCIUTTO: I get that argument. But there is also about explaining this decision to the American public, a decision that risks a military response. We have seen some of it, possibly not all of it, and the administration went pretty far out on its skis here, talking about how imminent it was and how specific it was.

I'm just curious, as a marine intel officer, if you went to your commander about to go into battle and he said, an imminent threat, he said probably, could be, I believe, your commander is not going to be satisfied with that answer.

TAYLOR: Well, having been to war, you never have enough stuff and you never have enough information. And that's the world that you deal with when you're in a battlefield situation. The president didn't need that legally under the AUMF to go conduct the operation that he conducted, killing enemy combatants is legal you can do that on the battlefield.

SCIUTTO: Okay, fair enough. I see where you stand. I want to ask you about other consequences here.

TAYLOR: Sure.

SCIUTTO: Because, question -- open question as to whether was further military response from Iran and they have their own problems domestically now. But with Iraq, America's ally, has fought alongside Americans for 17 years now, growing pressure inside, whether it ends up that way, we don't know, growing pressure for U.S. troops to leave, should U.S. troops leave Iraq?

TAYLOR: I think U.S. troops are a force for good in Iraq. We are a stabilizing Iraq. Actually, when I was participating 17 years ago, actually, this month, my unit was activated to go over to Iraq, we actually saw our brigade dealt with Iraqi -- Iranian spies coming in, literally weeks after we had come in.

So I think the Iranians have been there for a long time. They are supporting terrorist organizations, you have the Shia militias that are there. And the United States is a counterbalance to that. And I think that we're doing it smart. We have a relatively small footprint of a few thousand men on the ground.

And Iran has been ratcheting up their attacks around the region. They were attacked last year, they were attacking, you know, freighters, they were attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, shooting down American drones. I mean, the Iranians have been conducting terrorist operations. And I think the president, with what he did, he re- established -- SCIUTTO: But let me ask about Iraq, because the president now threatening to sanction our ally, Iraq, if they make -- which is their decision, the U.S. forces are there or not, is it -- would that be correct for the U.S. president to sanction an ally to pressure them on this question?

TAYLOR: I think the president is right to pressure them, to try to get -- to make sure American forces stay there. That's in the interest of the Iraqi people and I think it is more importantly it is in America's foreign policy interest. We've got to be a counterbalance to Iran.

Iran is conducting operations around the region. They've opened up fronts, they were in the West Bank and Lebanon in the '80s. They're in Syria, they're in Yemen. They're conducting operations in Iraq, terrorist operations in Iraq that are killing Americans. We have got to defend ourselves.

SCIUTTO: On the question of the nuclear program though, under the nuclear deal, I know you and other Republicans have been critical of it, but under the nuclear deal, Iran was under deep restrictions on enriching uranium, they had inspectors all over the country. Now, by all accounts, they're closer to building a bomb outside the deal than they were inside the deal. Are Americans safer with Iran outside that nuclear deal since the president withdrew?

TAYLOR: Yes. Well, one of the key problems with that deal is it did not do anything about terrorism. So while we --

SCIUTTO: I'm asking about the nuclear program. Are we safer or less safe with the nuclear program?

[10:25:01]

TAYLOR: But if you tell yourself, I got this deal where I stop one part of a three part problem, you still haven't addressed the other two parts, and the other two parts are ballistic missiles and terrorism.

On the nuclear weapon, you know, I certainly was never satisfied that we had the verification principles in place to actually be sure they were doing -- the Iranians were doing what they said they would do, vis-a-vis stopping. They have continued to foment revolution around the region. They're trying to take over other countries. They're doing terrorist operations all over the region. I mean, look, backing the Assad regime, that's a bad thing.

SCIUTTO: Yes, no question. Congressman Van Taylor, I appreciate you having on. I hope we can keep up the conversation.

TAYLOR: Great to be with you.

SCIUTTO: Coming up, why Michael Bloomberg wants to shake up the primary schedule. Lots more news to come there. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [10:30:00]