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Prosecutors: Bannon's "Last Minute" Effort To Testify Is "Irrelevant; Tomorrow's Hearing To Focus On Links Between Trump Admin, Extremists; Biden To Tout New Gun Safety Law Today With Mass Shooting Survivors; Biden Defends Upcoming Visit To Saudi Arabia. Aired 10- 10:30a ET

Aired July 11, 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]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: After receiving a letter from former President Trump waiving executive privilege, but the Justice Department is pushing back at that claim. In an overnight filing the DOK writes, "The defendant's sudden wish to testify is not a genuine effort to meet his obligations but a last-ditch attempt to avoid accountability."

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Keep in mind, his deadline for testifying was actually nine months ago in October. This comes as we are learning about new court documents showing that an attorney for the former president spoke to the FBI weeks ago and contradicted Bannon's claim that Trump had ever invoked executive privilege with regards to their testimony. We are following that.

And the January 6 Committee prepares for its next public hearing tomorrow. The panel expected to focus on how that final mob - and boy, to see those pictures again - came together. The role of extremist groups in the deadly insurrection and their connections to Trump's inner circle. Former Spokesman for the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group that took part, is set to testify about the group's inner workings and the role it played in trying to overturn the election.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JASON VAN TATENHOVE, FORMER OATH KEEPERS SPOKESMAN: Just to give a historical precedence to this group and how they have kind of radicalized. I was the propagandist for the Oath Keepers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Let's begin, though, with the latest on Trump ally, Steve Bannon, saying he is now willing to testify to the January 6 Committee. Jessica Schneider outside the courthouse where a preliminary motions hearing is taking place this morning. So Jessica, the point you made last hour, right, which was supposed to take place nine months ago, so this is eleventh hour - an eleventh hour appeal here in effect, so how do we expect this to proceed in the next several hours? JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well it's notable here, Jim, because Steve Bannon is set to go on trial one week from today, so the federal judge right now is beginning to hear arguments as to how exactly this trial will proceed. Now Bannon's attorneys have repeatedly asked for a delay of this trial, and prosecutors in an overnight filing, they talked about the fact that they want any evidence that Steve Bannon has now said that he will testify to the committee completely excluded from the trial here.

So prosecutors are really saying that Steve Bannon is trying ever trick in the book to try to change the narrative here about his obstruction of Congress, contempt of Congress charge - excuse me. And they're also saying that that evidence should just not be allowed. They're saying that Steve Bannon despite the fact that he's saying that he will now testify to Congress that that does not cure his previous contempt of Congress charge.

So prosecutors did write in an overnight filing here. They said, "The defendant apparently has not told the committee he wishes to provide documents responsive to this subpoena, so his eleventh-hour efforts do nothing to begin to cure his failure to produce records. Instead, his continued failure to comply with the subpoena's document demand while claiming he now will testify suggests his actions are little more than an attempt to change the optics of his contempt on the eve of trial, not an actual effort at compliance."

So prosecutors here really trying to paint the picture that Steve Bannon and his attorneys are doing everything they can to escape an actual trial set for one week from today. Now in the meantime in this DOJ court filing overnight, this revelation that Trump attorney, Justin Clark, actually talked to the FBI in an interview on June 29, and in that interview Justin Clark is said to have told the FBI that, in fact, Trump did not invoke executive privilege as to Bannon and all the material that the material asked him to hand over. So that's disputing Bannon's initial claim as to why he didn't comply with that subpoena.

So a lot unfolding here, Jim and Poppy, in these - in these recent days, and now the judge hearing these arguments as to how any trial scheduled for one week from today will move forward. We'll keep you posted.

SCIUTTO: Curious and curiouser (ph). Jessica Schneider outside the courthouse. Thanks so much.

HARLOW: Thank you, Jess. Joining me now to discuss, Paul Rosenzweig. He is a former Senior Counsel to Ken Starr during the Whitewater Investigation. Also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security. Paul, good morning. Thanks for - thanks for being here. So --

(CROSSTALK)

PAUL ROSENZWEIG, FORMER SENIOR COUNSEL, WHITEWATER INVESTIGATION: Good morning. Thanks for having me. HARLOW: So to be clear, if Bannon does testify, if he works out some deal with the January 6 Committee, the contempt of Congress charge, the initial crime charged does not go away. He defied the subpoena in October. So what do you think - what's the play here? What do you think Bannon is trying to do?

ROSENZWEIG: I think your reporter got it right. He's trying to muddy the waters and delay things. You're absolutely correct that his criminal contempt was complete back last October. What he's doing now is kind of like a bank robber who's robbed the bank, got caught, and the week before his trial says wait, wait. I'll give back the money. You know, no harm, no foul. And that's just not how criminal law works. You can't un-ring the bell. You can't undo the crime.

[10:05:00]

Add to that that his claim of executive privilege was, A, legally bogus from the start and now apparently was factually bogus because the president - former President Trump actually never invoked it, at least according --

HARLOW: Right.

ROSENZWEIG: -- to Mr. Clark. And what you're seeing is the chicken's coming home to roost for Mr. Bannon. He's facing a very difficult trial next week, and he's trying desperately to avoid it.

HARLOW: Talk about - and this is important here - the legal difference and the factual difference. The difference between sort of the executive privilege not holding up legally was one thing, right? He was way out of the White House by this time, but factually perhaps it seems like what Trump's former attorney, Justin Clark, told the Department of Justice is much more meaningful here and pertinent to what Bannon was saying is the reason he didn't talk, right?

ROSENZWEIG: I think that's right. The legal argument is one that lawyers love, and I think it was - it was bogus from the beginning as the courts have said, but now we're at the point where it's factually contested. If you say I didn't do this because my lawyer told me I shouldn't and then the lawyer turns around and says, no, no, didn't tell you that at all. That undercuts your factual defense completely and makes you out basically as a liar. And so, that makes it that much harder for you to assert that defense in front of a jury because somebody's going to come in and contradict you and say what Mr. Bannon just told you never actually happened.

HARLOW: Happened.

ROSENZWEIG: And that's pretty damning for him.

HARLOW: You - Paul, you wrote this article in "The Atlantic" back in March, and the headline is "Stop Waiting for Trump to Get Convicted". That was March. Now that we have had a number of these public January 6 Committee hearings, including some pretty bombshell testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson and the like and then what we've learned about the closed door deposition on Friday from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone (sic), I wonder if you still feel that way.

ROSENZWEIG: Well back that I was worried about the weakness of the factual case. There were very few direct witnesses of Trump's behavior. The January 6 Committee has done a great job, a really great job of putting us in the room where it happened so to speak and giving us testimony from people like Cipollone and Hutchinson about exactly what was going through Trump's mind. That still leaves us with a real problem, though, which is that 30 percent of Americans still believe that Trump was, you know, totally justified in what he did, that January 6 was just a peaceful protest, et cetera.

For a criminal case you need a unanimous jury, and it's still going to be awful hard to convince 12 people that Trump was responsible for this when at least one or two of them are going to be from that 30 percent. It is a tough case even with the facts all on our side, which is what they increasingly seem to be.

HARLOW: Paul Rosenzweig, thanks. Great to have your perspective and analysis. We appreciate it.

ROSENZWEIG: Thanks for having me.

SCIUTTO: Now for more on tomorrow's next public hearing by the January 6 Committee, joining me now to discuss, Republican Strategist, Sarah Longwell. Sarah, good to have you on this morning.

SARAH LONGWELL, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Thanks for having me.

SCIUTTO: So first big picture, I wonder if you were listening to Paul just there injecting a note of skepticism into the possibility that out of all this Trump may face a criminal referral or if he does then he would ultimately get convicted, and I wonder if you share his skepticism that that's where this will all end up?

LONGWELL: I share his skepticism, but I'm not sure. I mean, obviously that matters, but in the bigger picture us learning the truth about what happened matters. There being some mechanism for accountability for people like Steve Bannon matters. I mean, this January 6 Committee has been unbelievably successful in shaking loose so many new details, putting for so much more information.

And look, that matters both in our politics. It matters for the posterity in our history. There's all kinds of reasons why simply getting to the truth matters, and I think for people who - you know, for whom Trump's ultimate conviction is the only metric, that's a tough one, but there's so many other metrics on which you could judge this committee and its success.

SCIUTTO: Yes. No question. So let's judge by a different metric if we can. If it's not his ultimate indictment or conviction with this, what about his standing within the party and among Republican voters? Do you see that the revelations that have come particularly from the testimony of, for instance, a Cassidy Hutchinson and what we've heard since then that other witnesses have not contradicted her testimony, has that weakened Trump measurably? LONGWELL: I think it has. Look, I conduct focus groups all the time with Republican voters, and I saw something change after the January 6 Committee hearing started.

[10:10:00]

I've done at least four focus groups with Trump voters. And prior to the hearing you always got at least half the group saying they wanted Trump to run again in 2024, but when the hearing started suddenly no one wanted Trump to run again or it was much diminished.

And I think that it's not because they're sitting and watching these hearings and they're so persuaded by Cassidy Hutchinson's (sic) testimony. It's because the ambient noise around Trump just gets really loud and people don't love defending it. They start to feel tired by it. They want to move on. People do not like relitigating January 6. That makes them feel bad about their own judgments about Trump.

And so, they want to just kind of push past it. And so, I think it is hurting his standing because he's a lot to defend for Republican voters and they get tired of the drama. And also, there's lots of other Republican candidates they're excited about like Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott or just other people that they can move on to.

SCIUTTO: That was going to be my next question. Who are the credible challengers in the GOP, and who would you say is the most credible, has the most backing?

LONGWELL: Yes, look. There's just not doubt about it. In these focus groups when you ask people, OK, if Donald Trump doesn't run who do you want to see run. It is Ron DeSantis with a bullet. I mean, it's funny actually. It's very surprising to have people in Ohio know who the Governor of Florida is. That's just normally not something that's happened, but Ron DeSantis has really become the number one name that comes up, although there's lots of other names, and they're all really though from this Trump universe. It's Mike Pompeo. It's Kristi Noem.

It's funny. One of the things you don't hear, you rarely hear some of the old guard Republicans. Nobody ever says Mike Pence. You hear people like Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio. The new names that people put forward really are from the Trump MAGA wing of the party.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Sarah Longwell, always good to have you on. I'm sure we're going to be talking about this morning, so you're always welcome back on the program.

LONGWELL: Thanks for having me.

HARLOW: Still to come, President Biden is set to meet with victims' families and survivors of gun violence at the White House. That will take place one hour from now. We'll speak to one of the mayors who will be there. How the new gun violence bill, he's arguing, is making his city safer. That's ahead.

Also why Elon Musk is trying to walk away from his deal to buy Twitter and what this is all going to mean in a complicated court battle ahead.

SCIUTTO: Maybe a big fine.

HARLOW: Yes.

SCIUTTO: And protestors in Sri Lanka who stormed the President's Palace are making themselves right at home there, using the gym, having picnics, having a swim in the pool. Political uncertainty now facing that country. It is serious. That's still to come.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:15:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Later this morning the White House will commemorate the passage of the bipartisan gun safety legislation signed into law last month. Survivors and family members of victims of several mass shootings will be there in attendance, along with gun safety advocates and elected officials from communities plagued by gun violence.

I spoke to one of those leaders, Mayor Aftab Pureval of Cincinnati, about the new law and its affects.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: So you, like many other gun safety advocates, are going to join a White House event today to commemorate the signed of this bipartisan federal gun safety legislation. It didn't achieve everything folks wanted. It achieved some things.

I wonder does this legislation make the people of Cincinnati safer?

MAYOR AFTAB PUREVAL, CINCINNATTI (D-OH): It does. And I'm so proud of the Biden administration and the bipartisan coalition that came together to pass this important legislation. The first significant piece of gun legislation in 30 years.

There's a lot of things that are important to Cincinnati. It closes the boyfriend loophole. It provides $750 million to violence intervention strategies like drug court, veteran's court, and red flag laws.

But what keeps me up at night is not -- well, first of all, the mass shootings that we're seeing across the country in almost every community is heartbreaking and terrifying. Well, it keeps me up at night and what keeps the mayors up at night is the day to day casual violence that's happening in American cities that is often times proliferated by handguns.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, a collection of mayors from across this country met just a few months ago in Reno, Nevada to talk about innovative gun -- gun violence intervention strategies. And we're hoping that a lot of those strategies will get the funding necessary from this bill. SCIUTTO: You lead a blue city in a red state. And you've said that some of the state laws passing here, regardless of -- of what you're doing at the city level; make it less safe in your city. Tell us why.

PUREVAL: Absolutely. In 2019 we experienced a tragedy in Ohio. In just 32 seconds nine people were murdered in the city of Dayton --

SCIUTTO: I was there.

PUREVAL: -- in just 32 seconds 27 people were -- were injured. Everyone; all our state leaders, all our federal leaders came to the city of Dayton and said we are going to do something. Unfortunately what they've done is gone backwards. They -- they've passed a Stand Your Ground Bill. They've passed a bill that arms teachers, puts more guns in our schools and just recently got rid of licensing for concealed carry.

So instead of doing anything about getting guns off of our streets, unfortunately our leaders in Columbus have put more guns on our streets.

SCIUTTO: I went to Dayton for the aftermath and I remember at the time there was a moment where even some Republicans, Mike Turner among them, a representative from Ohio whose daughter was close to where the shooting was, they changed their tune for a moment said well, maybe now's the time.

But then, as we often see, I imagine its politics, right. Is that what pushes folks in that direction in the wake of something like this?

[10:20:00]

PUREVAL: I can't say for sure. Obviously politics has a piece of this. But let's get to the root cause of the violence. In -- in Cincinnati what we're seeing is two factors that are contributing to the gun violence.

Number one, the universal accessibility, easy access of guns. And number two, the inability for folks to resolve differences peacefully. There are more guns than people in our country right now. And because there are so many guns, people don't feel safe unless they have a gun. So guns beget more guns, which makes us all less safe.

And number two, disagreements that used to result in a fist fight now result in a shoot out. So those -- those two things combined are really making our American cities a challenge when it comes to gun violence.

SCIUTTO: Do state and local laws work without federal laws? Because often times you will see, and I've heard this from cops in New York for instance. You can have more restrictive laws in New York but -- but if you could drive the weapon up from the south where there are more lack laws, those local laws don't make a difference.

PUREVAL: The answer is no. We need laws at every level of government; federal laws, state laws, local laws and we need our leaders at all of those levels working together irrespective of politics.

The gun violence that we're seeing is not unique to one specific area of the country. It's all over the country. It's from coast to coast. So of course we need a federal response but we also need narrowly tailored interventions that are specific to the locations and the hotspots where they're happening and that's what we're doing in Cincinnati.

SCIUTTO: Did the Supreme Court by expanding a person's right to claim self-defense outside the home, in this most recent decision make it harder to pass legislation at a national level or at a local level to address gun violence?

PUREVAL: It did. We've seen over and over again whether it's a woman's right to choose, whether it's the environment, whether it's gun safety, the Supreme Court going in the opposite direction not only of public policy but of public opinion. Vast majority of Americans disagree with a lot of these decisions coming out with the Supreme Court. And now mayors are the ones that are left to effectuate the laws coming out of DC and coming out of Columbus.

When you're a mayor there's -- there's -- there's no spin, there's no obfuscation. You have to stand in the void and lead and that's why so many mayors across the country, irrespective of party, are frustrated with what's going on in D.C. and in their state capitals.

SCIUTTO: Well, Mayor Pureval, we appreciate the -- the effort you're making and thanks so much joining us this morning.

PUREVAL: Thanks, Joe.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HARLOW: Great interview. All right, ahead President Biden is defending in a public op-ed his trip to the Middle East this week. A trip aimed at resetting ties of Saudi Arabia. This is U.S. intelligence has deemed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman responsible for ordering the journalist -- the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. We'll talk about this trip ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:25:00]

HARLOW: Welcome back. This week President Biden travels to Israel and Saudi Arabia for meetings with leaders from those countries. But it is his planned meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that is getting a lion share of the attention and sparking a lot of criticism.

SCIUTTO: U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that the Saudi Crown Prince was responsible for the brutal murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi. The murder led to international condemnation.

And in 2019 then candidate Biden saying this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDREA MITCHELL, ANCHOR, MSNBC: President Trump has not punished senior Saudi leaders. Would you?

BIDEN: Yes. We were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, a pariah that they are. There's very little social redeeming value of the -- in the present government in Saudi Arabia.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: CNN's Arlette Saenz and Nick Paton Walsh join us now. You know it's interesting, Arlette, because the Biden administration policy towards Saudi Arabia has now essentially become the equivalent of the Trump administration policy following the murder, which was to say the relationship is bigger than the murder here. Is -- is -- is that in affect what we're seeing, particularly in a time of high gas and oil prices?

ARLETT SAENZ, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, CNN: Well, Jim, right now you've really seen this rebalancing of that relationship. The approach that President Biden is taking towards a Saudi Arabia, as he is arguing he is trying to bolster the security and strength of the United States.

Now first, in his trip to the Middle East he will be traveling to Israel, as well as the occupied West Bank before making that visit to Saudi Arabia that has drawn so much of the attention and controversy heading into this week.

And it all centers around President Biden's previous comments that you heard him say there as a candidate, vowing to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state. Of course the president also later released that U.S. intelligence report that found that Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But now, even though the president had vowed to isolate the Crown Prince, he is now bringing him into the fold. Now there has been some criticism of the president's decision to travel to Saudi Arabia but he is trying to confront that head-on.

He wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post over the weekend where he laid out some of his reasoning, his defense for going to the country, saying it is my job to keep our country strong and secure. We have to counter Russia's aggression, put ourselves in the best possible position to outcompete China and work for greater stability in a consequential region of the world.

To do these things we have to engage directly with countries that could impact those outcomes. That is part of why the president is deciding to really make this about face, traveling to Saudi Arabia, despite those previous comments.

[10:30:00]

Now the president will be there in the country also for a larger meeting with Gulf leaders.