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Trump's Legal Team Accuses Democrats of Political Theater in New Brief; Cases Drop, but U.S. Still Averaging 3,000-plus deaths each day; Critical Week for Fate of Biden's COVID relief plan. Aired 1- 1:30p ET

Aired February 08, 2021 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:02]

JOHN KING, CNN INSIDE POLITICS: We'll see if that can continue throughout the week when the Senate has to make some key decisions.

I appreciate your time today. Join us tomorrow for that special impeachment coverage. And don't go anywhere, a busy news day. Brianna Keilar picks up our coverage right now.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN RIGHT NOW: I'm Brianna Keilar and I want to welcome viewers here in the United States and around the world.

On this day before just the fourth impeachment trial of a U.S. president in history, the two sides are laying out their cases in pre- trial briefings released just minutes ago. House impeachment managers just submitted their latest filings. They accuse former President Trump of inciting an insurrection on January 6th at the U.S. Capitol, making him the only American president to be impeached twice.

In his defense, Donald Trump's lawyers say in their filing released today that impeachment is, quote, a brazen political act and should be rejected. They say there has been no investigation, pointing out Democrats cited just a handful law enforcement sources amid more than a hundred media reports in their case.

And Trump's defense points out there is evidence to show rioters were plotting violence in the days before the insurrection, quote, either the president incited the riots, like the article claims, or the riots were pre-planned by a small group of criminals who deserved punishment to the fullest extent of the law.

Let me turn now to CNN Congressional Correspondent Jessica Dean, who is following this for us from Capitol Hill.

Okay, Jess, so let's start with the impeachment managers. The briefing was just released. Tell us what else it says.

JESSICA DEAN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. So this is their response to the briefing by former President Trump's defense from earlier today. And in short, Brianna, their response is essentially there is no valid excuse or argument for former President Trump's actions, that he still remains directly responsible for the deadly insurrection that happened here at the Capitol.

Let me read you a portion where they pushed back on former President Trump's defense, that First Amendment defense. Here is what they say. They say, when President Trump demanded that the armed, angry crowd at his Save America rally, fight like hell or you're not going to have a country anymore, he wasn't urging them to form political action committees about election security, in general.

And when the president of the United States demanded that the Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger find enough votes to overturn the election or else, face a big risk to you and a criminal offense, that was obviously a threat, one which reveals his state mind and his desperation to try to retain power by any means necessary. The House looks forward to proving each of these points at trial.

And, Brianna, we know that they are going to rely heavily on video to really craft this argument that they have, putting all the responsibility at former President Trump's feet. And we don't know yet, Brianna, of course, about witnesses, exactly how that will play out. We know they'll have the opportunity to call for that and have a vote on that if they want to. Brianna?

KEILAR: So let's talk about the former president's defense now. There seem to be dedicating a lot of energy here to this argument what the president said in the speech that he made at the rally just before the insurrection. This is key to their argument. Talk to us about that.

DEAN: Right. They don't believe that -- again, they're going to make the argument that what he was saying was metaphorical, that it was not meant to actually physically fight but that it was a metaphor. And so -- that they also are arguing that he urged the gatherers to be peaceful.

So here is what they wrote in their brief. They said, despite the House manager's charges against Mr. Trump, his comments cannot and could not reasonably be interpreted as a call to immediate violence or a call for a violent overthrow of the United States government, so, again, arguing this is simply a metaphor.

But let's go back to the tape of what he said that day and listen for yourself. Here is former President Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DEAN: And, of course, it was after that rally, Brianna, that thousands of rioters marched here to the Capitol put together an insurrection, storming this Capitol and inflicting violence on people here. So we're beginning to see with these briefings kind of the contours of what these arguments are going to be as we move ahead in this impeachment trial. We have former President Trump's defense attorneys arguing that it's unconstitutional because he's no longer president, that he was simply saying things like fight like hell but that that was metaphorical, and, of course, on the other side, we have the House impeachment managers arguing that, no, this was absolutely what he intended to do and they are going to put together the video and evidence to show how exactly how all of those dots link up. Brianna?

KEILAR: Right. We're here on a big day. Jessica Dean, thank you so much for tracking it for us from Capitol Hill.

Let's get some expert analysis now.

[13:05:00]

Let's talk to Sophia Nelson, former House Republican Investigative Committee Counsel, and Julian Epstein, who is Chief Counsel for the House Committee Democrats during Bill Clinton's impeachment.

And, Sophia, to you, I know that these House impeachment managers just released their paperwork here. You're just getting a look at their case. But what so far are you seeing? What stands out to you? What's the strongest point the Democrats are making?

SOPHIA NELSON, FORMER HOUSE REPUBLICAN INVESTIGATIVE COMMITTEE COUNSEL: I think a few things. First and foremost, Brianna, context is everything. The former president was impeached while he was still president. The Senate delayed the trial. That would be one of my first arguments, that the Senate, Mitch McConnell, decided not to go ahead because they could have delivered this article immediately, and there could have been a trial. Mitch McConnell deferred not to do that.

The second thing is that I think is important, and it was raised also in the president's defense, former president's defense, is this reasonable man standard that we lawyers use in cases that we're trying about whether or not your average ordinary person would believe something to be true.

In this instance, in almost every defense case where the rioters who have been prosecuted or brought in by the FBI, almost all of them have said, Brianna, that they believe the president was calling them to come to Washington, defend the Capitol, help prevent the overthrow of the government in the sense that from the other side that there was not this free and fair election, and Joe Biden was not elected president of the United States, and that the election was stolen, i.e., the big lie.

So there was incitement that goes way before the day of January 6. It started with the big lie right after the election.

KEILAR: Julian, what are your thoughts so far on what you know about the case from House Democrats?

JULIAN EPSTEIN, CHIEF COUNSEL, HOUSE JUDICIARY DEMOCRATS DURING CLINTON'S IMPEACHMENT: Well, I think you'll see, led by Jamie Raskin, a friend for many years and a constitutional scholar, is they will not get bogged down in these sort of silly arguments about whether the president's speech met the incitement standard or whether you can impeach a former president. Those are really sort of besides the point arguments.

The major point that the managers will make is this, that President Trump engaged for two and a half months an illegal effort to block the certification of a presidential election. And when that effort failed, he summoned a violent crowd to the Capitol that resulted in an attack on the Senate and the House chamber. That is an abuse of power.

If you walked into a classroom, a law school classroom, and asked the students to come up with an example of something that would be a greater abuse of power, students would have a difficult time trying to figure out what would be a better example of an abuse of power.

The managers do not have to prove any standard like incitement or the Bradenburg standard that people talk about a lot in order to meet some kind of criminal requirement, there is no criminal requirement in impeachment. They shouldn't get bogged down in that kind of argument. They won't.

I don't think they have to get bogged down in the question of whether you can impeach a former president. We've had former officials that have been impeached. Clearly, there is nothing in the Constitution that gives a president a safe harbor in his final month in office to engage in illegal conduct and be immune from impeachment. I think this very, very majority of constitutional scholars are on the side of the argument that you can impeach a former official and a former president.

So I think the big thing for the managers is to keep their argument on the big picture, which is this was a gross abuse of power, the likes of which we have never seen in this country.

KEILAR: And, Julian, just quickly, I want to get both your opinions on this. Trump's defense team, what do you think about their defense?

EPSTEIN: Well, apart from the fact that they don't seem to be able to spell very well, their argument, again, is sort of what I would call the weasel argument. Let's not really contest the facts because you can impeach a former president. That's just wrong as a matter of constitutional structure, it's wrong as a matter of precedent and it's wrong as sort of a matter of common sense. And it is also wrong because courts, as Chief Justice Rehnquist said in 1993, do not review an act of impeachment by Congress.

So it is highly unlikely outside some gross abuse of the impeachment process that the courts would tell Congress they can't impeach a former official. What that really is is the weasel argument that is giving cover for the Republican members that don't want to stand up and sort of deal with this sort of weird addiction they have, almost opioid addiction, to a leader that, in the long term, is going to do the party much more harm than good.

[13:10:04]

So it's what I call the weasel argument.

And then the second argument that the managers are making is that the House managers must show some violation of a criminal standard, and that's wrong for the reasons I just articulated.

KEILAR: Sophia, key to whether the former president incited might be, well, how did he respond once he saw what was happening, right, once he saw what was going on in Capitol Hill, which he can see play out on his television screen. And we have reporting that he was happy about it.

Trump's attorneys push back on the idea that he didn't move fast enough to try to quell the rioters on that day. They put a footnote that the White House tried to take immediate steps, but, quote, complex procedures got in the way. What do you make of this?

NELSON: Yes. I think that's a bogus for a couple of reason, and I was going to go there. First and foremost, he sent out a tweet about Pence that I feel was inciting violence toward the vice president of the United States at the time, and I've seen a lot of discussion about this, and I think that's something the managers need to focus on.

And I think in the second point, what you're saying is about how he reacted. Witnesses inside the White House spoke to reporters, people who were in the room saying he was gleeful about this, excited about it. That's very sick if you think about it. This is the commander-in- chief of the United States at the time, and he was taking glee in the fact that he had incited his supporters to do exactly what they went to do, and like I said, it gets back to this reasonable standard.

All of these people who have been indicted or arrested or who will be prosecuted are all saying, well, I was answering the call of my president. I was going to the Capitol to do something to protect the republic. 1776, you heard what they were arguing and yelling as they were rummaging and destroying the Capitol building that day.

So I think they've got a real problem here. But Julian is right, what else are they going to argue, Brianna? The facts are not on their side.

KEILAR: Sophia, Julian --

EPSTEIN: But let me just make a quick point about that because --

KEILAR: Very quick, Julian, I'm about to get the hook here.

EPSTEIN: The House managers cannot get bogged down in the tweet about Pence or whether the president didn't respond on time or appropriately when he knew the violence was going on. Those are the things that the defense attorneys can fudge. They have to keep the focus on the big picture, which was this was an illegal attempt to overturn an election that culminated in a violent attack on the Capitol.

There is nothing like that that has ever happened in U.S. history. It is the grossest abuse of power you can imagine. And that's all you need for impeachment. You don't need to get bogged down into this sort of other minutia and sort of debatable legal points and debatable factual points.

KEILAR: All right. We'll see if they take your advice. Julian, thank you so much. Sophia, great to see you both together again. Thank you.

EPSTEIN: Thanks for having us.

KEILAR: Of course.

There is a critical week beginning here for the fate of President Biden's COVID relief plan, and it includes the possibility of a new child tax benefit worth up to $3,000.

Plus, as the number of coronavirus cases are dropping, an alarming new warning that this U.K. coronavirus variant is actually spreading faster in the U.S. than was previously thought.

And the Biden administration is considering forcing all passengers on domestic flights to test negative before boarding. We're going to discuss that.

This is CNN special live coverage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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KEILAR: The nation is surpassing 27 million cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began, but this rise of new cases is slowing. We're now seeing an average of 117,000 new cases per day. This is down 21 percent from last week, and it's down 52 percent from a month ago, which is certainly hopeful news.

The grim news though is that the U.S. is still averaging more than 3,000 deaths per day. So, yes, while we are turning the tide finally on this deadliest surge of this pandemic, the numbers are still frighteningly high, even as many Americans have started to become numb to 3,000 people reported dead in a day from this virus, because that is where we still are right now.

Since New Year's Eve, 117,000 people have died, 117,000 people just in this year alone, which is, of course, we're only about a month into it now. One in five American deaths in this pandemic happened last month. And the enormity of that is really hard to grasp. But let's try.

This right here is the University of Tennessee's football stadium during a pre-pandemic game, 102,000 people there. That is how many people have died here since Americans watched the ball drop on New Year's Eve. A stadium's worth of Americans grasping for their final breaths or dying from blood clots or slipping slowly away after their organs fail, many of them alone as it happens. A stadium's worth of Americans whose heartbroken family and friends are consumed by grief.

And since the pandemic began, four and a half stadiums, four and a half stadiums full of grandmothers, grandfathers, moms, dads, sons, daughters and friends.

And even as case numbers do appear to have crested, there are some new concerns about this impact of these variants of the virus. There is a new study that found that the U.K. variant is 35 percent to 40 percent more infectious than the original strain, and cases involving this variant are actually doubling every week. The White House COVID-19 response team addressed this issue in its briefing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR: And although hospital admissions and cases are consistently dropping, I'm asking everyone to please keep your guard up.

[13:20:04]

The continued proliferation of variants remains of great concern and is a threat that could reverse the recent positive trends we are seeing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Dr. Richina Bicette beset is with us to talk more about these variants. She is the medical director of Baylor College of Medicine. She is an emergency medicine physician.

Look, the risk, I think, Dr. Bicette, of feeling like it's just kind of one hit after another here, we're starting to see these numbers crest, and now there are these variants and it seems very scary. Why is this U.K. variant more contagious? And is it more deadly, or is that just a factor of it being more contagious?

DR. RICHINA BICETTE, MEDICAL DIRECTOR AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE: So there actually have been some preliminary studies that are showing that the hazard of death has increased with this new U.K. variant. Now, to me, I'm not 100 percent certain what that means because if the virus is more transmissible, more people are going to get it and then, of course, more people are going to die.

So they do still need to do a little bit more data crunching and a few more studies in order to figure out if it's more deadly. But one thing we know for sure is that it's definitely more transmissible and it's spreading extremely quickly.

I think people are quelled right now because the numbers in the U.S. seem to be low. We had just over 600 cases. But what people don't know is that we're not actually doing genetic sequences of as many COVID cases as they are doing in other countries. So we really don't know how many cases of the new variant we have in the U.S.

KEILAR: Yes. This is just sort of a piece of the puzzle, right, this data that we do have. The CDC has warned that this particular variant could become the predominant one by next month. The U.K. shutdown is a response to this variant. There does not appear to be an appetite for that here in the U.S. What does that going to mean for us here? BICETTE: The new variant will become the dominant strain in the United States. I have no doubt about that. Right now, scientists are estimating that about 1 percent to 2 percent of cases are of this new variant. Cases are doubling about every ten days. People are still gathering. I was at work yesterday looking at videos of people having Super Bowl parties, there were clubs in Tampa where celebrities were hosting masses of people without masks. This thing is going to take a hold of us pretty quickly.

I think the positive trend that we've seen recently with the numbers are going to take a hit if we don't get a handle on this.

KEILAR: Another variant is the South African variant, and we learned today that South Africa paused its rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine because there was a new study that showed it only provided minimal protection against the new variant that they're experiencing. Is that the right move?

BICETTE: Well, if they can get access to other vaccines, then it may be the right move. But if the AstraZeneca vaccine is the only vaccine that they can get their hands on, I think the best bet is to get people vaccinated as quickly as possible.

We don't know what the vaccines that we have available are truly going to do against these new variants. Studies suggest that it may still be effective, but the best example we have is a real world example. If you look at Israel, Israel has done a phenomenal job in vaccinating their country. Over one-third of its population has already gotten at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

And although the U.K. variant is the dominant strain in Israel, they are still seeing a drop in hospitalizations and a drop in deaths. It proving that vaccinations do work.

KEILAR: The CDC is considering requiring that passengers have a mandatory negative COVID test before they're allowed to fly within the U.S. Is that something that is realistic? Is that something that needs to happen?

BICETTE: My answer to that is what took so long? We have people that are traveling, that are boarding planes that may not have symptoms and are unknowingly spreading the virus, and then we've heard those cases who knowingly have COVID and are still getting on planes and are spreading the virus. These are very close spaces with air that's continuously circulating, so it's very easy to transmit and to possibly pass on the virus if you have something. So why not get tested and have everyone be negative before they're allowed to travel?

KEILAR: Yes. It's a very good question. Dr. Bicette, it is always great to see you and get your great insight. Thanks for coming on.

BICETTE: Thanks for having me, Brianna, good to see you.

KEILAR: Some Democrats are at odds over COVID relief checks, whether there should be an income threshold for receiving one. Plus, Democrats are set to unveil a child tax credit that is worth $3,000, so we're going to about how that would work and who it would .impact.

And a judge rules that one of the Capitol suspects can travel to Mexico for a vacation even though she is not allowed to travel to D.C. We'll discuss.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:25:00]

KEILAR: Congress is very busy right now dealing with the historic second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

[13:30:02]

Congress is also tackling a massive COVID relief bill that could help Americans trying to make ends meet.