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Evidence Shows Trump Pressured DOJ to Overturn U.S. Election; Feds Raid Home of Jeff Clark, Ex-DOJ Official at Center of Coup Plot; Supreme Court Issues Ruling on Abortion Rights Case. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired June 24, 2022 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: The Supreme Court and the justices are set to release new opinions any moment now. One of them could impact abortion access across this country.

A crowd of protesters already gathered in front of the court. We will bring you breaking developments the moment we have them.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: But first, the January 6 committee laying out in stunning detail new evidence showing how high ranking Justice Department officials rejected repeatedly former President Trump's scheme to use the DOJ to back his false claims of widespread voter fraud, those top officials detailing how it all played out in multiple meetings and phone calls after the election.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD DONOGHUE, FORMER DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: What I'm just asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.

JEFFREY ROSEN, FORMER ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL: At one point, he had raised the question of having a special counsel for election fraud.

At one point he raised the -- whether the Justice Department would file a lawsuit in the Supreme Court.

A couple of junctures there were questions about making public statements or about holding a press conference.

The Justice Department declined all of those requests that I was just referencing because we did not think that they were appropriate based on the facts and the law.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Repeated attempts to overturn the election. Much of yesterday's hearing focused on former DOJ Official Jeffrey Clark, pictured there, who played a central role in pushing Trump's false election frauds and who Trump, at one time, wanted to install as the acting attorney general. Just hours before yesterday's hearing, federal agents raided Clark's home. We're going to have much more on what led them to do that, coming up.

HARLOW: Our panel of experts joins us as we cover the angles. Let's begin though with reporting from our Sara Murray. I mean, Sara, the select committee really bringing into focus DOJ official Jeffrey Clark's role, significant role in the former president's scheme.

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, absolutely. Rolling out how former President Trump wanted to just set aside Jeff Rosen and then steal Jeffrey Clark as the acting attorney general. And, look, the witnesses, they are in person and in their video testimony were not holding back on what they thought about Jeffrey Clark and his qualifications.

Listen to what Richard Donahue, who is acting deputy attorney general, had to say about Clark.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONOGHUE: I made the point that Jeff Clark is not even competent to serve as the attorney general. He's never been a criminal attorney. He's never conducted a criminal investigation in his life. He's never been in front of a grand jury, much less a trial jury.

And he kind of retorted by saying, well, I've done a lot of very complicated appeals and civil litigation, environmental litigation and things like that. And I said, that's right, you're an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office and we'll call you when there's an oil spill?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MURRAY: Now, officials were also alarmed when they heard about steps that Jeffrey Clark was willing to take to try to push this notion of voter fraud, potentially try to overturn the election. Listen to what this White House lawyer said about those plans.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIC HERSCHMANN, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE LAWYER: When he finished discussing what he planned on doing, I said good (BLEEP), excuse me, sorry, f'ing A-hole. Congratulations, you just made the first step or act that you take as a attorney general would be committing a felony and violating rule 6C.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MURRAY: So, the people around Clark making it pretty clear they thought the actions he wanted to take were insane, potentially unlawful. And now, of course, we know that Clark's home has been raided. Back to you, guys.

SCIUTTO: Sara Murray, thanks so much. Let's talk about this. Joining us now to discuss, CNN Political Commentator S.E. Cupp, CNN Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin and CNN Anchor in Inside Politics Sunday -- Host -- Anchor rather of Inside Politics Sunday, Abby Phillip. Thanks so much to all of you.

Jeffrey, tell us what this says about the DOJ investigation at this point. Because for them to raid that home, they would have to prove to a judge, as Evan Perez was reporting last hour, that they have reason to believe there was evidence of a crime in the house but also reason to believe the possibility of destruction of that evidence. How seriously do they have to prove something before they do something like this?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Well, I mean, this is enormously important at many different levels. For one thing, we were not sure -- the public was not sure -- that the government -- that the Justice Department was even investigating anything besides what was going on at the Capitol. Now we know that not only are they investigating a much broader possible conspiracy, they are investigating someone who was dealing extensively with President Trump.

So, this investigation has now reached inside the White House and inside the Oval Office. That's what that search warrant means. Now, it doesn't mean that Clark or anyone else will be charged for certain but the magnitude of the investigation is much greater than we knew previously.

The other thing we know is that you don't get a search warrant into someone's house and for their phones based on something that happened a year-and-a-half ago.

[10:05:07]

They need information that there is presently something on those phones that justifies a search. So, that means this investigation has found some evidence that there is some ongoing activity that justifies a search. You can't get a search warrant for someone's house saying, well, a year-and-a-half, they did X, Y and Z. You have to say, there is presently evidence available that the investigators need to see. That's what made -- that's one of the many things that makes this search so extraordinarily important.

HARLOW: Abby, we heard just in the open of the show there the sound from Donoghue saying the president wanted him to, quote, say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the GOP congressmen. If you couple that with what else the committee presented, which was that several sitting members of Congress asked for prospective pardons, basically blanket pardons to cover any future potential criminality, what does the combination of those two things indicate to you?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I think it's pretty clear that it indicates they knew that what they were doing was wrong, potentially illegal, that it required a certain degree of deception of the public. Because, I mean, what they were basically -- what Jeffrey Clark was trying to strong-arm the DOJ into doing what was to lie about the idea that there was sufficient or sufficient suspicion that there was fraud in the Georgia election. He knew that that wasn't true and that was the whole objective.

At some point, Jeffrey Clark says to the acting deputy attorney general, Rosen, that he would give up on the idea of taking over DOJ if Rosen and Donoghue would sign this fraudulent letter to Georgia that would throw the election into chaos.

This really lines up with what we knew and were reporting at the time about what was going on with Trump and the people aiding and abetting him. They knew that they didn't have any evidence but they were just looking for anything to kind of slow or stall or even stop the process of Biden being certified as the winner of the election and inaugurated on January 20th.

SCIUTTO: Those words, by the way, chronicled, S.E. Cupp, in contemporaneous notes, those words of the president. Just say the election, as it says on our screen, was corrupt and leave the rest to me, and he actually added, and Republican congressmen. The night of January 6th, two-thirds of the House Republican caucus voted to decertify election results.

Is this evidence, as it's presents and as it relates to the president, S.E. Cupp, is it impactful for the Republican Party and his supporters, I mean, who brushed off so much in the last 18 months? Is there anything you've seen here that moves that dial for them?

S.E. CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Listen, there's a wing of Trump supporters who will not be moved by anything. They will firmly believe, probably to the end, that the election was rigged because the president says it was. But if you switch over to Fox, I saw a number of Fox analysts and hosts saying, this looks really bad.

And I don't think, frankly, Republicans or Democrats think that this is an election issue. And let's not forget this is an election year. But I do think you have some Republican members of Congress who are wondering, okay, how far am I going to go backing this idea when clearly it looks like President Trump was using the DOJ to try to break our election system, to try to break democracy. Maybe I won't be as full-throated in my defense of this.

So, I think there is some concern at how bad and egregious and obvious this effort was but I don't think you're going to find any soul searching among his hardened supporters.

HARLOW: Jeffrey, to you, Elliot Williams on our program yesterday was predicting that the hearing yesterday afternoon was going to be most consequential so far. I wonder if you think it was.

TOOBIN: They have all been quite consequential. I think what's interesting to me is taking them as a whole because they have been organized in such a way that you see what the president has done, is he has tried with different audiences to overturn this election. You had one hearing about trying to convince the vice president to overturn the election

[10:10:00]

You had another hearing about trying to convince the states to overturn the election. And yesterday, you had a hearing about trying to use Justice Department to overturn the election. It's the cumulative effect of all of that, which is most meaningful to me.

Now, that is as a moral and historical matter. Whether it is true that any crimes were committed by Donald Trump or anyone else, I'm not prepared to say at this point. I don't think I've seen enough evidence at this point. Certainly, yesterday was something that justified a criminal investigation. I mean, there is no doubt that what was going on there as the people involved knew.

I mean, I think that's another thing that's interesting about these pardon requests is that even at the time all, these people knew something bad was going on here. This is why Eric Herschmann, the lawyer, is saying to Eastman, you need a criminal defense lawyer. That's why he's saying to Jeffrey Clark, you're going to commit crimes if you do what you say you're going to do.

The air of criminality is not something we're imposing after the fact. They knew at the time. And that's significant. And we'll see where it goes.

SCIUTTO: Standby, Jeffrey. We do have breaking news just in to CNN.

The Supreme Court has just issued, and this is the decision many were waiting for, ruling in Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, this, the major case, regarding abortion rights in this country. Jeffrey Toobin still with us here.

As we wait to read this decision, Jeffrey, put into context how consequential this is.

TOOBIN: Psychologists have a term called flashbulb memory, which is you remember where you are when something happened, a big deal, 9/11, Kennedy assassination. Today is the moment right now when we are going to learn the fate of constitutional abortion rights in America.

In 1973, is Supreme Court decided Roe versus Wade and said the right to -- a woman's right to choose abortion was up to her until the moment of -- until viability on the part of the fetus. They reaffirmed that many time, including in 1992 in a case that year. And now, the Dobbs case involving a statute out of Mississippi is a case about whether abortion rights will continue under the United States Constitution.

This is especially bizarre scenario in Supreme Court history because a draft opinion of this -- in this case was leaked about six weeks ago where Roe v. Wade was overturned. And what we are going to find out momentarily is whether that draft opinion resembles the court's opinion, which has now been released. And it's a very historic and important moment.

HARLOW: So, Jeffrey, standby. I want to get straight to our Jessica Schneider who is outside of the court with more. Jessica, what is the opinion from the court?

JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Poppy and Jim, the court issuing that landmark ruling that this nation has been bracing for and the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, that they have eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion. And at first glance, this opinion is very similar to that draft opinion that we saw leaked just about a month-and-a-half ago at the beginning of May.

So, what we're seeing at first glance here is that this is a 5-4 decision. This is an opinion written by Justice Samuel Aletto joined with those other conservatives, Justice Thomas, Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh.

The chief justice, John Roberts, not joining in the opinion but joining in the judgment, meaning that he agrees that the Mississippi 15-week abortion ban should be upheld but not agreeing with this sweeping proclamation that Roe v. Wade is overturned.

We are looking into this opinion but this will have immediate effects here. By all estimates, about half of the states are expected to eliminate the right to abortion. We have got about a half dozen states that have so called trigger laws that their abortion bans will go into effect either immediately or within the next 30 days or the next few months.

And then we have about dozen states with so-called zombie laws. Those were actually abortion laws that were on the books before Roe v. Wade in 1973 that will then go back into effect.

On the flip side, there are about 16 states in Washington, D.C., that have sort of amped up their abortion protections. So, they are expecting potentially to see an influx of patients coming into their states to actually get abortions for people who are living in states that will soon not be able to get abortions.

So, this is, in fact, a landmark ruling here. This is overturning nearly 50 years of precedent that was first established in Roe v. Wade and then affirmed in Casey, the Casey decision in 1992.

[10:15:08]

Those opinions, and for 50 years, there has been a constitutional right to an abortion from the Supreme Court. Women have been able to get abortions. The state has not been able to restrict abortions up to the point of viability about 23 to 24 weeks, but now this court upending the past 50 years of history, and, again, this looking very similar to that draft decision again written by Justice Samuel Alito. In the draft decision, he said that Roe v. Wade was egregiously wrong.

So, we're going to go through this opinion and look at how it compares. But if it similar, which it appears to be, he'll talk about how there's really no historical precedent for the Supreme Court upholding the right to an abortion and that this should really be left to the states. This is what this opinion will do. It will say that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to abortion and it's left to the individual states. And one last thing, guys, Justice Alito had said in that draft opinion, and probably says it in this one as well, that this is just too divisive an issue to kind of glean from the Constitution when it isn't specific about abortion and about the right to an abortion. This is something that needs to be decided by individual states where people have the right to vote in their elected representatives and the court here saying that that power should be returned to the states. It will be returned to the states now that the court has over turned Roe v. Wade. Jim and Poppy?

HARLOW: Jessica Schneider, thank you very much. We're going to let you read through more of the opinion.

But as Jessica said, this is a court that has just upended a half century of law, of a constitutionally protected right to abortion. It affects nearly every family across America in one way or another.

We have our team here. Joining us, the former federal prosecutor, Jennifer Rodgers, CNN Senior Political Correspondent Abby Phillip, and our CNN Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin and also CNN Legal Analyst and Supreme Court Biographer Joan Biskupic.

Joan, let me begin with you. Very similar, it appears to the draft, 5- 4 decision, Roberts joins in the judgment. Your first reaction and who this affects the most.

JOAN BISKUPIC, CNN LEGAL ANALYST AND SUPREME COURT BIOGRAPHER: It definitely affects poor women the most who won't be able to travel from state to state. But I have to say, as a thresholds matter, Poppy, it's so startling. Even though we had seen a glimpse of it on May 2nd when the draft had leaked, it still is so amazing to look at this right now and think of 50 years of Supreme Court precedent and a constitutional right. This was a constitutional right that the 1973 court declared suddenly evaporate in this moment, and to also think about how different this Supreme Court is in America. This is a court made up of three Trump appointees all in their 50s. They will be with us for a very long time and setting the law of the land.

So, to get to your question about who this would affect, of course, this would affect women, families, generations of Americans, because gears have been switched now. Obviously, the administration is going to try the take some steps to counter it. But once you lift a constitutional right the way this five-justice bloc has done with such sweeping defiance of precedent, it will be years and years before the court even thinks about going back, if it ever does. This is a ruling for the age, Poppy.

SCIUTTO: This -- your reference to precedent is important because, Joan, as you know better than us, extends beyond this case. I mean, 50 years of a right that past court muster at multiple levels. We had this New York gun law that was more than 100 years old, right, that past court muster for many generations. These are all justices who are asked in their confirmation hearing if they respect precedent. They all said yes, repeatedly. And we know the chief justice, who you have written a biography about favored slower movement rather than quick movement when it comes to precedents like this. Tell us about split in this decision here as it reflects that.

BISKUPIC: That's exactly right, Jim. This decision was essentially 5- 1-3 with the one being Chief Justice John Roberts concurring, in part, to say he would have upheld with the majority, the Mississippi ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy. But he would have not taken this leap to overturn Roe v. Wade. And this is significant because Chief Justice John Roberts has never favored abortion rights but he has wanted to protect the institution of the Supreme Court and reinforce the adherence to precedent, the regard for precedent, which is the cornerstone of the Supreme Court's work.

So, what he said here is, yes, to uphold Mississippi but this is such a big change for America and this is the Roberts court.

[10:20:04]

HARLOW: It is. And, Joan, as he said just three years, four years ago, Roberts court sometimes get in trouble when they sweep more broadly than necessary.

Jeffrey Toobin, to you, let's talk about the impact state to state, trigger laws, laws already in states now that will immediately take effect.

TOOBIN: Will immediately take effect. And if you think that this is going to lead to some sort of the neat solution where, well, in one set of states, it's legal and another set of states, abortion is illegal, that's not how it's going to work. This is going to be a legal civil war between the states because you are going to have situations in many states where it is illegal to help people get abortions.

And so people from other states are going to give money. They are going to travel to those states. They are going to participate in trying to help these women get abortions. If you travel from New York to Oklahoma to help a woman get abortion, are you going to be prosecuted? If you send money, are you going to be prosecuted?

HARLOW: Companies that have been funding people.

TOOBIN: And there's also the issue of the commercial impact of this, boycotts. What if a company says they are going to pay travel for abortion out of another state? Anti-abortion people may want to boycott that company. What if they say they are not going to pay for abortion? Pro-abortion rights people will say they are going to boycott that company.

I mean, this is going to have enormous ramifications but they all start with the effect on women who will lose a right that they have had for 50 years in this country.

SCIUTTO: Jennifer, when you look at just specifically the Mississippi case here, the Dobbs case, this speaks to the broadness of this -- the breadth, I should say, of this decision. Because that beyond the 15 weeks, it had no exceptions for rape or incest, as many of these laws, trigger laws and so on, we see. I mean, that is quite a broad change in this country. Imagine your wife or girlfriend or daughter raped or the victim of incest in that case, but it also affects other issues, does it not, going forward, that raises questions about IVF, for instance, what happens with embryos that are not implanted when women are seeking to have babies. Just help folks who are at home understand how broad this goes.

JENNIFER RODGERS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes. Listen, it's a heartbreaking betrayal of half of the country. Sorry, I'm getting -- watching the women there, it's emotional. It's a real problem. And people are talking about privacy issues. Can states who are trying to criminalize abortion not just to the women getting them but of doctors providing them, of people driving them to the clinic, are they going to be able to search your apps? There's apps that track menstrual cycles. How far are these states going to try to go in criminalizing every single aspect of women trying control their reproductive rights?

And that's where it gets scary because we don't know what states are going to try to do. And, as Jeff says, it's going to be a patch work and it's going to lead to laws where they try to really invade people's privacy in unprecedented ways and then those will have to be challenged and work their way through the court. So, we're talking about a period of chaos here where women not only can't be confident that they can get an abortion but can't even be sure that they have the right to track their own cycles, I mean, to control other parts of their reproductive processes in a way. So, we have taken for granted not just for 50 years but really for centuries.

TOOBIN: If I can just add one point. I'm trying to go through the opinion now. It looks almost identical to the leaked opinion, including the phrase that Roe was egregiously wrong when it was decided. And it is worth pausing to consider if this decision was egregiously wrong, more than a dozen Supreme Court justices since 1973 have said, it was actually quite right. So, this just gives you an idea of how different the five justices and the majority. The three Trump justices plus Alito and Thomas are from the other Republican appointees who have upheld this law for many years.

SCIUTTO: And, by the way, in their confirmation hearings, those words never left the mouths of the folks on the majority side of this decision. In fact, they were pressed on this and often in those answers -- and, by the way, they can't say how they are going to decide decisions but they did go out of their way to say they respect precedent, yes.

TOOBIN: Brett Kavanaugh has a concurring opinion, where he's basically trying to protect Susan Collins. Because as many people may remember, Susan Collins said -- who is supposedly pro-choice on abortion said, well, Kavanaugh assured me that he believes in stare decisis when it comes to Roe v. Wade. And Kavanaugh has this concurring opinion saying, I said I was for stare decisis but this case is an exception.

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HARLOW: Joan Biskupic, I'd like to go back to you and to the point that Jeffrey made about 12 times then since the early '70s, the court has upheld this most notably in '92, in Casey, when those three justices came together, albeit in a very different court and Sandra Day O'Connor wrote something very important about the institution of the court as a body irregardless of justice's personal feelings about abortion. Can you take us back to that and how that translates to now?

BISKUPIC: We have a whole different crop of Republican-appointed justices compared to back in the '90s, '70 and '80s. What a lot of people don't remember is that Roe v. Wade was written by a Nixon appointee, Harry Blackman, when it was crucially upheld in 1992. It was three Republican appointees, centrist conservatives, Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy, who decided, just as you just read from that line of O'Connor's, Poppy, that the court is not to define the moral choice for everyone. They might disagree with it, Roe, and, in fact, they did disagree with Roe but it had become so much a part of American society, so much a part of American law and was rooted in the Constitution at least in terms of their minds that that's why it involved being upheld.

Since the 1973 court, there have been 15 new justices on the bench and nine of them went along with this. Some a little bit reluctantly, like Sandra Day O'Connor, many robustly just because it has been part of precedent, but only six broke off and five of them are still with us. And that's the point we have got right now. This is such a different court that America is going to have to get accustomed to. The three Trump appointees are only in their 50s.

SCIUTTO: On a whole host of decision, frankly. We saw on guns yesterday, on abortion rights today. This is the entire decision now. We've been going through it.

I do want to read a quote from the majority opinion here written by Justice Alito. He writes that Roe was egregiously wrong from the start, its reasoning was exceptionally weak and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey, the case that followed in 1992, have inflamed debate and deepened division.

In fairness, I'll read as well from the dissenting opinion, in a joint dissenting opinion. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kaga, they write with sorrow for this court but more for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection. We dissent.

If you can, Jeffrey, describe the division on the court on this issue, I can't imagine a more stark one.

TOOBIN: Well, it is, and it really goes to the conception of the Constitution and what the Constitution means and how it should be interpreted. The conservatives are, for the most part, what they call originalists, who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted as the people who ratified it in the late 18th century understood the words to mean. And as the Justice Alito's opinion says, the Constitution doesn't mention abortion, so there's no right to abortion. That's the end of the story, to him.

Other justices feel that the Constitution has to be interpreted in light of how the society has changed and sometimes described as a living Constitution and abortion rights was certainly -- Roe v. Wade and this decisions ratifying, it certainly was a decision that was based on a living conception of the Constitution.

The originalists are winning. And they won yesterday, at least that's how Justice Thomas raised his opinion in the guns case. But, you know, again, it depends how cynical you are about how the Supreme Court works. Some justices just want to reach one result or reach another result and they find a justification. But, certainly, as an interpretative matter, the difference between originalism and a living Constitution is what the debate over abortion and the Supreme Court is about.

HARLOW: So, Joan, Justice Alito writes in the majority opinion, we hold that Roe and Casey must be overturned. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, okay? That's what Jeffrey is talking about, substantive due process. This is way beyond -- can have implications way beyond abortion.

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If you look back to all of these other cases, Loving versus Virginia, interracial marriage, Griswold, the right to obtain contraception, Lawrence versus Texas, the right.