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January 6th Panel Subpoenas Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell; Ohio Math Teacher Travels the U.S. to Spread the Big Lie; Biden Administration Defends Controversial Trump-Era Border Policy in Court. Aired 10:30-11a ET
Aired January 19, 2022 - 10:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[10:32:10]
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Today the National Archives plans to release four pages of Trump-era White House documents to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack. This appears to be the first time the committee would get any of the records which the former president tried and has so far failed to keep secret. It comes on the heels of a CNN exclusive overnight. We've learned that the committee has now subpoenaed and obtained phone records for Eric Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, formerly of FOX, she's now engaged to Donald Trump Jr.
BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN ANCHOR: Now that's the first time the committee has issued a subpoena that targeted a member of the Trump family. The committee also subpoenaed four more people including former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a pair of attorneys who peddled election lies.
Let's bring in former federal prosecutor and CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
Jeffrey, great to see you. So let's talk about those four subpoenas that we had issued yesterday. One of the attorneys, Sidney Powell, said that she will appear before the committee, though she is still tied to the lies that she peddled, and says that she believes that that is, in fact, the truth. Given the significance of these, what do you make of it?
JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Well, I'll believe that when I see it. You know, Sidney Powell and especially Rudy Giuliani are under criminal investigation as we speak, and any sane lawyer would advise them to take the Fifth. I am certain that Rudy Giuliani will take the Fifth. Sidney Powell may show up and answer some questions. But I'd be very surprised if she engaged substantively with the committee.
SCIUTTO: Jeffrey, so we have this news from the New York attorney general. This is about Trump Organization. You know, the big picture here has been that the Trump Organization basically played both sides of the ledger here. Exaggerating assets to get loans and deemphasizing them, shrinking them, to reduce their tax burden here. This is a civil case here.
Based on what you've seen so far from the attorney general, do they have a case and where does it go from here?
TOOBIN: You know, Jim, this is an amazing document. The level of detail is extraordinary, and the lying that Trump apparently engaged in is just so extraordinary. Let me give you an example. One of the issues is the valuation of his condo in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York. In some documents he says that the condo had 30,000 square feet. In other documents he says it has 10,000 square feet.
Now the condo is a place in the world. It can be measured, and the idea that he would lie about the size of an apartment that can be measured is just indicative of the level of lying that's accused here. I think, you know, this is relevant to both the New York DA's criminal investigation as well as the civil investigation. There's a lot of overlap here, and I think it's a very serious case.
[10:35:04]
I think that the president and his family has a serious problem if these submissions, you know, one to get a loan, one to keep your taxes low, are as false as they appear.
SCIUTTO: Most people's houses would fit into that square footage many times over.
GOLODRYGA: Yes.
SCIUTTO: Jeffrey Toobin, I know we're going to be talking to you about this again. Thanks for coming on.
TOOBIN: It is like, you can measure. You can get a tape measure and ruler and that's just a fact in the world.
SCIUTTO: Yes. Or he could lie.
GOLODRYGA: It's also a fact that he embellished a lot, exactly.
SCIUTTO: He can lie.
(LAUGHTER)
SCIUTTO: Jeffrey Toobin, thanks so much.
Coming up next, a portrait of the big lie and how it's threatening future elections. An Ohio math teacher turned election fraud influencer is getting big audiences across the country.
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[10:40:34]
GOLODRYGA: A math and science teacher is fueling the big lie by traveling to dozens of states, speaking to audiences and convincing them his debunked election conspiracy theory has merit.
SCIUTTO: He's spouting a false claim, a nonsensical claim that he discovered somehow an algorithm proving the 2020 election was stolen despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud as we've seen in courts and even many partisan recounts.
CNN's Sara Murray has the details.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DOUGLAS FRANK, MATH TEACHER: Just about every county in the country was hacked.
SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is how the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen gets even bigger.
FRANK: I'm standing against the whole establishment that's saying, oh, that was the cleanest election in history.
MURRAY: That's Douglas Frank, an Ohio math and science teacher who's traveled here to Texas and dozens of other states.
FRANK: Hi, everybody.
MURRAY: With the financial backing of other conspiracy-minded Americans, claiming he uncovered an algorithm proving the election was stolen. He has even absurdly claimed his findings could land Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.
FRANK: I'd like the country to stand up and say, wow, this thing was ripped off, let's do a do-over, or let's put Trump back in office.
These data we're bringing in are --
MURRAY: Frank's findings have been debunked by mathematicians and election experts. And more than a year later, there is still no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. But Frank is still winning audiences with lawmakers, election officials, and voters across the country.
FRANK: We're going into each state clandestinely, and I meet privately with legislators, and secretaries of states, and attorney generals.
MURRAY: He is just one in an army of foot soldiers inspired by Donald Trump's election lies now trying to convince others the 2020 election was stolen.
FRANK: Who are these 35,000 people who mailed in ballots? You need to find out, Super-Mom.
MURRAY: Frank is connected with women he calls Super-Moms who have embraced voter fraud claims and are clamoring for post- election audits, running their own door-knocking campaigns to try to uncover fraud and advocating for hand count only elections.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: In Colorado, we are a red state.
TONI SHUPPE, ELECTION DENIER IN PENNSYLVANIA: There's absolutely no way that Joe Biden legitimately won the state of Pennsylvania.
MARYLYN TODD, ELECTION DENIER IN CONNECTICUT: We need to stand our ground here in New Hampshire and we need to have a real audit.
MURRAY: Perhaps most critically --
FRANK: So if you don't know who I am, I'm the guy that Mr. Lindell discovered.
MURRAY: Frank has the backing of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
FRANK: He paid for me to be here talking to you, so buy his pillows.
MURRAY: A deep-pocketed purveyor of election disinformation.
MIKE LINDELL, CEO, MYPILLOW: We have poured so many resources into this. Now you can help out and get a good night's sleep. I am now offering the lowest price ever on Queen MyPillows.
MURRAY: With Lindell's support --
FRANK: Mr. Lindell flew his private jet to pick me up to take me to meet with the secretary of state.
MURRAY: -- Frank has crisscrossed the country sharing his fraud claims wrapped in a fancy-sounding mathematical equation.
FRANK: I was the perfect person in this world to discover this. I have exactly the right skills. I have found a sixth little (PH), you know, in every state in the country. They're inflating our registration rolls, stuffing phantom ballots, and then cleaning it up afterwards. It's that simple.
MURRAY: Experts say Frank's conclusions are nonsense.
JUSTIN GRIMMER, POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: He's much better at presenting himself as a professor than even myself. He gets up, he has a bow tie. He talks about all this data. He talks about a sixth order polynomial.
MURRAY: Justin Grimmer is a Stanford University professor who looked at the data for 42 states and found Frank's algorithm to be essentially worthless.
GRIMMER: I think this took my research group an afternoon to uncover that there's no basis for this. But if you're not someone who, like me, spends all day working on statistics and data, sixth order polynomials in nearly perfect correlations, it sounds like he's uncovered something, you know, really impressive.
FRANK: The red curve --
MURRAY: Frank uses the number of registered voters by age group and prior voter trends to predict voter turnout, then claims it is evidence of fraud when it aligns with actual voter turnout.
GRIMMER: Effectively, what he's doing is he's discovered that anything that you measure in the world is closely related to itself. MURRAY: Debunking Frank's wild claims also wasn't difficult for
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, who met with Lindell and Frank on two occasions.
JOHN MERRILL (R), ALABAMA SECRETARY OF STATE: Every time they gave us an example we were able to refute what they showed us without even knowing what they were going to do.
MURRAY: Frank blamed the, quote, "complete botch" in Alabama on his newly-hired staffer.
To others, Frank's presentation confirms their baseless suspicions that Joe Biden wasn't fairly elected.
[10:45:03]
ADRIENNE SOUTHWORTH (R), KENTUCKY STATE SENATE: People say we know that other states are wrong but we think Kentucky must be right. And I say, well, how do you know, and they have no idea, they just assume? And so I said, well, that's kind of the problem.
MURRAY: Kentucky State Senator Adrienne Southworth says she came away more convinced 2020 was problem-plagued after hosting an event with Frank.
SOUTHWORTH: I think the whole world's on the edge right now of, are we going to continue trusting the system?
FRANK: So I'm a scientist.
MURRAY: It was just one of Frank's stops on his nationwide tour. In Missouri, a "Voter Fraud is Real" bootcamp featured Frank and a state representative, with a flyer calling on county clerks to attend. In Colorado, Frank met with Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk now under investigation by the FBI for her alleged involvement in a security breach of the county's election system.
In Montana, the "Montana Free Press" reported Frank met with staffers for the state attorney general. Here in Texas --
ISABEL LONGORIA, ELECTIONS ADMINISTRATOR, HARRIS COUNTY, TEXAS: I'm going to walk through these checks and balances again.
MURRAY: Harris County elections administrator Isabel Longoria says a scam like Frank describes with widespread hacking and phantom votes would never succeed.
LONGORIA: If you even change a period, a period in the election programming, it sends up a red flag that immediately stops the entire process until we can identify what would have triggered that red flag.
MURRAY: In Harris County alone, election officials inspect thousands of voting machines.
LONGORIA: Six months out we start checking all 13,000 pieces of voting equipment in Harris County, opening them up. Do they turn on? Have they been tampered with? Can we take them to a voting location? Are all the buttons working?
MURRAY: They run accuracy tests under the watchful eyes of bipartisan observers. And on election day, they track the number of people showing up to vote and the number of ballots cast, one of many safeguards that would catch an election inflated by phantom voters.
(On-camera): So somebody would have to find a way to break into the voter rolls for every single county?
LONGORIA: In tandem. Again, breaking into multiple buildings, multiple systems in tandem with not a single red flag going off in this incredibly sensitive system, all in unison, right, as you have all eyes on elections from every election staff.
MURRAY (voice-over): After Frank's pitch in the Lone Star State this week --
FRANK: What does the media say? Oh, Texas might be turning purple. Don't believe it. You're red.
MURRAY: He sat down for an interview with CNN and defended his efforts to undermine confidence in America's elections.
FRANK: It'll be a constitutional crisis. It will be a crisis. It's going to happen. It's inevitable. It's going to happen and I'm helping that happen, yes.
MURRAY: He stands by his flawed conclusions convinced the elections are rigged, regardless of the many experts who have debunked his claims.
FRANK: I said I know the elections are not real. I know the elections are being manipulated. Regardless of who wins, I just want them to be fair.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MURRAY: Jim and Bianna, demand for Douglas Frank's bogus presentation isn't dying down. Across the country, groups are still footing his travel bill to hear him speak.
Back to you.
GOLODRYGA: Thanks to Sara Murray.
And Jim, proof that a scam comes in many forms including a mathematician in a bow tie. Right?
SCIUTTO: And it's false, and it's bene disproven so many times. Clearly there are some folks who can't be convinced by facts.
GOLODRYGA: Yes. Well, coming up, the Biden administration is in court today to actually defend a controversial Trump-era policy. More on the immigration stance it wants to keep using, ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [10:53:00]
SCIUTTO: The Biden administration is in court today defending its own use of a controversial Trump-era immigration policy.
GOLODRYGA: The Public Health Authority known as Title 42 was invoked at the start of the pandemic. It allows authorities to quickly remove migrants encountered at the border, effectively stopping them from seeking asylum.
CNN's Priscilla Alvarez is live in Washington and she joins us now.
So, Priscilla, what exactly is the DOJ arguing?
PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, these oral arguments started just moments ago and the Justice Department attorney kicked it off saying they need this public health order to avoid the transmission of COVID-19 in congregate settings or otherwise those border facilities.
Now to remind viewers, this is a public health order invoked under the Trump administration in 2020. And we reported at the time that there were suspicions among officials that there was political motivation behind this public health order. And it has since received fierce criticism from immigrant advocates who say it puts migrants in harm's way and doesn't allow them to claim asylum, and public health experts who say that this public health order isn't even based on public health.
Now the arguments that we expect to hear this morning from the Justice Department are very similar to those made under the Trump administration which is that the -- to avoid the transmission of COVID, migrants shouldn't be allowed to be in these border facilities for processing. Instead, they should be rapidly expelled, either back to Mexico or to their origin country so they don't have to undergo that level of processing.
Now we should note that this case today is specifically about families and subjecting families to the order. The Biden administration has exempted unaccompanied minors from being subject to this which is different from the Trump administration. And of course there's always exemptions. There are some migrants who have been allowed into the U.S. and on that front, Jim and Bianna, another big challenge.
An immigration court backlog, we are learning, that is now 1.6 million cases. That is just about the size of Philadelphia. So even those migrants allowed into the U.S. will likely have to wait months if not years to get their cases resolved because of this backlog.
[10:55:05]
A union -- the president of the Immigration Judges Union telling me this is a crisis.
SCIUTTO: Months and years to wait for decisions, remarkable.
Priscilla Alvarez, thanks so much for joining.
And thanks so much to all of you for joining us today. It's good to have you. I'm Jim Sciutto.
GOLODRYGA: And I'm Bianna Golodryga. "AT THIS HOUR" with Kate Bolduan starts right after a quick break.
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