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1/6 Hearing Outlines GOP Efforts To Shut Down Trump Fraud Theories; Republican Election Atty: Trump Campaign Was "Bringing Cases Without Actual Evidence The Trump Campaign Did Not Make Its Case"; Leader Of Prominent White Supremacist Group Among Those Arrested Near Idaho Pride Event. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired June 13, 2022 - 15:00   ET

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

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[15:01:14]

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: Top of a brand new hour on CNN NEWSROOM. Good to have you. I'm Victor Blackwell.

We begin with the latest case from the January 6 House Committee that Donald Trump held a key role in the insurrection at the Capitol. At its second hearing, the Committee kept pounding the proof that Trump refused to listen to the truth that he lost the 2020 election and not from Democrats but from his own people in the White House and working on his campaign. His campaign manager, Bill Stepien, recalled what he told Trump about his prospects, this is just after the election.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL STEPIEN, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN MANAGER: Very, very, very bleak. I - we told him the group that went over there outlined my belief and chances for success at this point. My belief is that it was a very, very - I mean, 5 percent to 10 percent is not a very good optimistic outlook.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: Five percent to 10 percent there. Well, then the Committee showed how Trump continued to embrace allegations of fraud, although White House lawyers told him the accusations were baseless or they just weren't substantial enough to make a real difference. And the Justice Department, they told him there was no there there, but Trump kept listening to the conspiracies and telling the same lies.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD DONOGHUE, FORMER ACTING DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: It gets back to the point that there were so many of these allegations that when you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn't fight us on it, but he would move to another allegation.

He said there's "lots of fraud" going on here. Told him flat out that much of the information he's getting is false and/or just not supported by the evidence. We look at the allegations but they don't pan out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: Well, the Committee also shows that Trump chose to work with the advisors who pushed his election lies. Listen to Attorney General Bill Barr.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL BARR, FORMER TRUMP ATTORNEY GENERAL: I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with - he's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff. On the other hand when I went into this and would tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were. My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: That hearing ended with a clip of riders who swarmed the Capitol on January 6th 2021, repeating Trump's election myths. A warning some of this language you're going to hear now is offensive.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fake election. They think they're going to fucking cheat us out of our vote and put and put (inaudible) Biden in office. It ain't (inaudible) happening today baby.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get out of the way.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Whatever happens, we're not laying down again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm from Pennsylvania. It didn't work. It absolutely.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It worked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It didn't work.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Inaudible)--

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Trust the system.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two hundred thousand people that weren't even registered voted. Four hundred and thirty thousand votes disappeared from President Trump's tally.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It worked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And you can't stand there and tell me that it worked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't want to say that what we're doing is right, but if the election being stolen, what is it going to take?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju is with me now. So you spoke, Manu, with Committee members after the hearing about whether there's a criminal case against the former president. Of course, the DOJ, one of the audiences for the presentation, what do you learn?

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Because one of the big things here that came out in the hearing was the amount of money the Trump campaign raised in the aftermath of pushing those bogus notions that the election was stolen.

[15:05:05]

The rigged election claims, all the email solicitations it sent to its supporters, roughly a hundred million dollars in about a week's time, according to the Committee, another $250 million total. And when I asked the Committee members, the leaders of the Committee whether they had evidence that there could be a crime, they stopped just short of saying that, saying ultimately it will be up to the Justice Department to make that case.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU (off camera): Mr. Thompson, what is your personal opinion? Do you think that Donald Trump committed a crime and would you prefer that the Justice Department investigated them or even indicted him?

REP. BENNIE THOMPSON (D-MS): Well, I'd prefer that we complete our work and share that work with the Department of Justice and they will make that call after that.

REP. ZOE LOFGREN (D-CA): They're the prosecutors, not the legislative.

RAJU (off camera): But do you have evidence to show that he committed a crime?

THOMPSON: That's not why we're working. We're looking for the facts and circumstances that brought about January 6th and that's what we're doing.

LOFGREN: We're legislative in this, they're the prosecutors.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: Now, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren told our colleague, Annie Grayer, that there is indeed evidence that the Trump associates and Trump himself benefited personally and financially from all of these claims of election fraud. And when asked about this by our colleague, Jake Tapper, Lofgren said that there was a $60,000 (inaudible) - $60,000 was given to Kim Guilfoyle who's Donald Trump, Jr.'s fiancee and there she spoke for two and a half minutes at that so-called stop the steal rally before the insurrection here at the Capitol. That is one piece of evidence the Committee potentially here will lay out in the coming days and weeks ahead and also questions about what is next for this committee.

Today, there was a - the Committee was drawn for a bit of a loop when Bill Stepien, that top Trump campaign official could not appear at the last minute because his wife was going into labor. They did show a video clip of his sworn deposition behind closed doors. They do not plan to call him forward to come testify.

They also don't plan to have Bill Barr the former Attorney General come in. They say that the video evidence that he gave today that was featured prominently was enough for them to make their argument here that everybody around Donald Trump, at least the people very close to him are saying that it was - that the election was not stolen but Trump was not listening. Victor?

BLACKWELL: Manu Raju reports on Capitol Hill. Let's get into all that right now with CNN Political Commentator Errol Louis, Political Anchor for Spectrum News, Stephanie Grisham, who served as White House press secretary during the Trump administration and Harry Litman, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General and former U.S. Attorney. Welcome to you all.

Errol, let me start with you because you're sitting right next to me. We heard these extended portions of the recorded testimony, these depositions. And let's start with Bill Barr here, this is Bill Barr talking about the work he did to try to chase down some of these claims.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARR: The department, in fact, when we receive specific and credible allegations of fraud, made an effort to look into these, to satisfy ourselves that they were without merit. And I was in the posture of trying to figure out - there was an avalanche of all these allegations of fraud that built up over a number of days and it was like playing whack a mole because something would come out one day and then the next day it would be another issue.

Also, I was influenced by the fact that all the early claims that I understood were completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation. And so I didn't consider the quality of claims right out of the box to give me any feeling that there was really substance here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: No there there, effectiveness of the presentation.

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: That's right and not very effective, because he's talking as somebody who was unquestionably a partisan of the President. It's somebody who Donald Trump relied on to do some fairly detailed work, fairly aggressively partisan work in some ways as the attorney general and he was criticized for it. The whole books had been written about it. And so for Bill Barr to then after the fact say, listen, we checked

out everything. I said all kinds of people, the FBI has said Justice Department officials all over the country chasing down these claims and we couldn't find anything, not a little bit, not a question, not any ambiguity just nothing at all.

And it goes to a very interesting question about whether or not the President truly believed it and so you get the bombshell headline that I think everybody's going to be talking about for the next day, which is whether or not he was detached from reality. But there's also this question about whether or not he's doing something that's called willful blindness, sort of deliberately disregarding the information and pretending he doesn't know, pretending he never heard it somehow and I think that is what could get him into legal trouble.

BLACKWELL: Let me come to you, Harry, on that - the question of the willful blindness and whether he actually believed it and still told the lie and let's play here Bill Stepien from the campaign - campaign manager in which he talked about the separate teams that were influencing the former president.

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEPIEN: There were two groups of family (ph). We call them kind of my team and Rudy's team. I didn't mind being characterized as being part of team normal, as reporters , kind of started to do around that point in time. Like I said hours ago early on that I've been doing this for a long time, I think along the way I've built up a pretty good, I hope, a good reputation for being honest and professional and I didn't think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: If you're deciding on criminal charges, you've got - described as an intoxicated Rudy Giuliani on election night in one ear and you've got the campaign and the White House lawyers on the other, just walk us through what has to be proven to determine if there's actual fraud here.

HARRY LITMAN, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY: All right. So his intent needs to be proven, but it can be done in any of several ways. As you were just saying, Victor, willful blindness is a form of knowledge under the law so a jury could conclude that when he says he actually believed it, he was putting his head in the sand and ignoring.

And it's important here, by the way, it's not like half his team said this and half his team said that. Every sober, if you will, person in the room was telling him this. The other team was just imported, dredged up from nowhere for the sole - they have the sole credential of being willing to tell the emperor that he was still wearing clothes, a guy like John Eastman, who were going to be hearing about Peter Clark. These are just minor players until they come to Trump's attention,

specifically, because they'll rebut all the grownups in the room. So anyway, willful blindness would show it. A jury could just not believe them, right. They could just say when they - when he - if he testifies, by the way, that would be a murderous cross examination. But if he were to testify, they could just think he's lying.

And finally, even if he believes that he has somehow won, it doesn't justify some of the crimes that he could be charged with. It doesn't give them a legal entitlement to go and mess with the January 6 proceeding. It lets him go to court, which he did 60 times and they - and he failed every single one.

So I think the team normal versus team crazy is what really emerged today and really no credible grownup source in the room was saying anything but. And your point, I think, is excellent that it was very effective for the Committee to use sort of insiders, not Democrats, but people who were close to him to say there was nothing here. Not a little bit, nothing.

BLACKWELL: Stephanie, I want to play for you the nugget of news that we got from the members of the Committee, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren on a payment made to Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is Donald Trump, Jr.'s fiancee. This was for a speech made on the Ellipse that day, January 6th.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: And you say - you were just asked, I think, by Manu Raju - if the Committee has found evidence that Trump and his family 'personally benefited'.

LOFGREN: Yes.

TAPPER: Personally benefited from donations and you said, "Yes." That's a serious allegation. Do you have more details? Is that a crime?

LOFGREN: I don't know - we're a legislative committee, so that's for somebody else to decide. But, for example, we know that Guilfoyle was paid for the introduction she gave at the speech. I mean, on January 6th, she received compensation for that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: We talked with Congressman Kildee a moment ago about the electoral benefits potentially of carrying the water for the President's big lie, but the money itself - what do you hear there?

STEPHANIE GRISHAM, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Well, I think that what I kept seeing or feeling when I was watching today was just manipulation. Donald Trump manipulated so many voters into thinking the election was stolen that people stormed the Capitol and people died. But talking financially, they absolutely are using people and using this election fraud, right. They raise all this money off of a election defense fund, when in reality, as the Committee showed today, they were paying people for Trump lined packs and then also an event strategies company that made $5 million.

Now, hearing that Kimberly made $60,000 on that one event didn't surprise me. It did disgust me. But these people are fundraising in order to line the pockets of Trump loyalists and the Trump family. And I mean, even after the Committee, I don't know about anybody else, but I received three fundraising emails from Trump asking for small amounts of money to keep fighting the left wing and the media, et cetera.

So it's all manipulation. It is willful blindness. So this is right out of the Trump playbook.

[15:15:01]

He always would go to people who would tell him what he wanted to hear. He would wave his hand at anybody who said a point he didn't like and this is - it's just - I hope I wish this - today would have been on prime time. I think that today was very damning. I think that it was - it's very important for people to know what happened, certainly for the DOJ but just for people to understand Trump is manipulating you, period. He doesn't care about you.

BLACKWELL: Stephanie Grisham, Errol Louis, Harry Litman, thank you.

Thirty-one men are facing conspiracy to riot charges in Idaho after police found them inside a U-Haul with shields and masks.

And take a look at the Dow now, stocks continuing to sell off here at more than 800 points falling off a cliff here in the final hour of trading. We'll get into that in a moment.

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[15:20:16]

BLACKWELL: A little army, that's how a concerned citizen described a 31 white nationalists arrested this weekend in northern Idaho as they were gathered near a pride parade. One of them Thomas Ryan Rousseau, leader of the group Patriot Front, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls one of the most prominent white supremacist groups in the country.

CNN's Nick Watt is with me now. So Nick, the mayor and the police chief of that northern Idaho town, they spoke briefly today. What did they tell you about Rousseau and how he and the others were caught?

NICK WATT, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Victor, basically, they were caught by that concerned citizen you just mentioned seeing a bunch of guys getting into the back of a U-Haul truck in the parking lot of a hotel up there in Coeur d'Alene. This person called the police.

All those men apparently were wearing matching uniforms of khaki pants, blue polo shirts and the police say that they had with them shin guards, shields, at least one smoke grenade. And the police make it very clear that based on paperwork that they found, this group of people were planning to cause some kind of confrontation in Coeur d'Alene.

Now, the group, we are told, is Patriot Front. That is the group these men are believed to belong to. It was formed in 2017 after those protests in Charlottesville. There was a schism within the leadership of another neo-Nazi group and Patriot Front broke off led by, founded by Thomas Rousseau, who was just a teenager when he founded the group. He is among the - those arrested in Coeur d'Alene.

Now, according to Southern Poverty Law Center, this group believes that democracy has failed, that unless you are of 'founding stock', white European, then you're not actually an American. They want a white ethno state. Thirty-one men, average age 26 from a bunch of different states, most of them Texas, Utah, Washington.

Now, the Mayor of Coeur d'Alene, very keen to distance Coeur d'Alene from its far-right past, this was an Aryan nation stronghold for a while. Take a listen to what he said just about an hour ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR JIM HAMMOND, (R) COEUR D'ALENE, ID: We're not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations. We are past that and we will do everything we can to make sure that we continue to stay past those kinds of problems. We are a culture of love, of kindness and we will continue to be.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WATT: I mean, the thing is Coeur d'Alene has, again, in the past few years become a magnet for people with right-wing and extreme right- wing views that's borne out in the polling in the recent primaries just a month or so ago. Now, the Police Chief of Coeur d'Alene also said this morning that his department had received at that point 149 calls, about half of them he said were people thanking the police for doing their job, the other half, so that's a significant chunk where people screaming and yelling at the cops, he said, for basically just doing their jobs and their job as they saw it this weekend was stopping a riot while this pride parade was going on in a park in Coeur d'Alene and they say this group of men were intent on causing chaos. Victor?

BLACKWELL: Nick Watt for us with the reporting. Nick, thank you.

CNN Law Enforcement Analyst Michael Fanone is with me now. He's a former Metropolitan Police officer who was at the Capitol on the day of the insurrection. Michael, good to have you. Shields, shin guards, at least, one smoke grenade but the Mayor says that they were just there to scare some people because they were no firearms, what do you think?

MICHAEL FANONE, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: I mean, I think intimidation was clearly a motivating factor in their presence. But the fact that they came with shin guards and shields, that tells me that there is, at least, the idea that there may be violence associated with their presence. BLACKWELL: So the SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center, says that

immediately after the insurrection groups like those that were there that day, they died down a bit. They did lay low. But recently they've seen this resurgence that they are now reinvigorated by some of these web - these wedge issues like critical race theory, also LGBTQ discussion in schools.

Do you see a through line from what we saw on the sixth to what we're seeing now with these groups now targeting potentially pride events?

FANONE: I do. I mean, if you go back even years before January 6th, you started to hear a lot of elected leaders, politicians who were talking about things like replacement theory.

[15:25:05]

Those resonated with groups like this and you started to see them become much more prominent in their activities. After January 6th, I think you could attribute the law to the fact that there were so much law enforcement attention being paid to these groups. And now they're starting to see that many of these prosecutions have not yielded with the sentences and that perhaps they could reemerge and continue their activities.

BLACKWELL: Nick just mentioned that half of the calls that came in to the Coeur d'Alene City Hall and police were people just screaming at them for stopping the group, for doing their job. I read your opinion piece that you wrote and published on cnn.com over the weekend about how you were impacted, what it felt like when other members of law enforcement derided you for your role to protect the Capitol on January 6th.

FANONE: Yes. I mean, it was an interesting experience. I guess, to put it mildly, you had officers that responded to the Capitol on January 6th and even in amongst those you had officers that experienced very different things. I mean, there are some officers that went there that day that didn't experience any violence.

And, I mean, I've had conversations with officers who've told me that it was a false flag operation, it was Antifa, it was Black Lives Matter and these were people that work for the Metropolitan Police Department, were in Washington, D.C. on January 6th. And so if you can't convince those officers of what actually happened on January 6th, how you going to convince police officers outside of Washington, D.C. who may be in solidarity with some of these ideologies?

BLACKWELL: Michael, I saw you in the hearing room today. What did you make of the Committee's effort to connect the lies that were told to what happened on the sixth?

FANONE: I mean, I think the Committee is doing an outstanding job. I mean, I went into this hearing wondering myself whether Trump was a delusional person or whether he was a calculating liar. And I left the hearing realizing that it was really like an equal combination of the two. I mean, it was so striking to hear that individuals in his inner

circle who self-described as the normal team, people like Bill Barr, Bill Stepien, Derek Lyons, Jeff Rosen, Eric Herschmann, Richard Donoghue. And then to hear their reactions to the claims that the 2020 election was stolen and these are Trump allies, and I wrote them down - silly, bogus, complete nonsense, bullshit, crazy stuff, ridiculous, simply not true, doesn't pan out and absolute rubbish.

And when Trump heard that, he replaced them with people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne. So to me (inaudible) as an African American it is very telling.

BLACKWELL: Yes. Michael Fanone, thank you so much for the insight.

FANONE: Yes, sir. Thanks for having me.

BLACKWELL: Sure.

Justin Bieber says he has a rare condition that has paralyzed one side of his face. We'll take a closer look at Ramsay Hunt syndrome the singer is suffering from next.

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