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Hearing to Lay Out What Trump Did for 187 Minutes on January 6; DHS Inspector General Tells Secret Service to Stop Investigating Potentially Missing Text Messages; Biden Tests Positive for COVID. Aired 10-10:30a ET
Aired July 21, 2022 - 10:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: It is the top of the hour. Good morning, everyone. I'm Poppy Harlow.
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto.
Tonight, the January 6th committee is expected to hold its most significant hearing yet. Two former top level Trump White House aides will testify. The panel will also plan to show outtakes from this video message, the former president recorded for his supporters the day after the attack on the Capitol.
HARLOW: Primetime hearing tonight will focus on Trump's inaction, as the insurrection unfolded. Last hour, January 6th Committee Member Republican Adam Kinzinger tweeted a preview of what you'll see tonight, as the panel details where Trump was and what he was doing, as that violent mob descended on the Capitol.
So, let's begin this morning with our Justice Correspondent Jessica Schneider. So, Kinzinger putting this tweet out, can you play some for us and talk to us about the significance of what we are seeing?
JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, absolutely. And it really goes to the fact that the committee is really going to hammer down here on what they're calling Trump's dereliction of duty.
So, what Committee Member Adam Kinzinger just tweeted really does drills down on that and it just further illustrates what Kinzinger said earlier this week, that during a large chunk of those 187 minutes, Trump was, in Kinzinger's words, gleefully watching T.V.
So, here's the clip showing multiple White House officials documenting what Trump was doing.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAYLEIGH MCENANY, FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: To the best of my recollection, he was always in the dining room. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. What did they say, Mr. Meadows and the during that brief encounter that you were in the dining room? What do you recall?
GEN. KEITH KELLOGG, FORMER VP NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: I believe they were watching the T.V.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you know whether he was watching T.V. in the dining room when you talked to him on January 6th?
MOLLY MICHAEL, FORMER EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT: It's my understanding he was watching television.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you were in the dining room from these discussions, was the violence at the Capitol physical on the screen, on the television?
PAT CIPOLLONE, FORMER WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: Yes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HARLOW: Okay. We're having a hard --
SCIUTTO: Jessica Schneider there. Yes, we lost our audio, but you did hear the audio of what several senior aides to the president said -- the former president, I should say, was doing there, watching T.V. in the dining room as the violence unfolded.
To speak about the significance of the video evidence, as well as the witness testimony this evening, let's speak now to former White House Ethics Lawyer Richard Painter. He is co-author of American Nero, the History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law and Why Trump is the Worst. Also with us, CNN Political Commentator, former Republican Congresswoman Mia Love. Good to have you both on here.
Richard, you're an ethics lawyer. There are legal questions involved in this investigation and ethical ones. Whether the DOJ charges, let's set that aside for a moment. But from an ethical standpoint, to have a sitting U.S. president, while violence is unfolding on the Capitol, to sit back and watch T.V. in the dining room and not act to call those supporters back, what is, at a minimum, the ethical breach there?
RICHARD PAINTER, FORMER WHITE HOUSE ETHICS LAWYER: I would say that even if the violence at the Capitol had nothing to do with Donald Trump, even if these people were not his supporters, he is president of the United States, has an obligation to protect and defend the Constitution. And there is a process in the Capitol, in the Congress for counting the electoral votes. And this was an attempt to overthrow that process.
So, even if he had done nothing to set this into motion, he had an ethical obligation, a duty, it was his sworn duty to take prompt action to defend the Capitol, to defend the vice president, to defend the members of Congress.
But we happen to know that he, indeed, did set these events into motion. This was part of a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the United States government, to overthrow the results of the November election. And we have seen the entire pattern of conduct, including meetings in the White House, conspiring to send in the military to redo the election, pressure put on the Department of Justice to declare the election invalid, the tweet saying that Mike Pence somehow had let everyone down, cowardly in not overturning the election.
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This was part of seditious conspiracy. It was a felony. And when you commit a felony, you are responsible for the actions of others in connection with that felony. For an ordinary person, it would happen there would be felony murder, when a police officer is killed at the Capitol building because of a felony, a seditious conspiracy. So, this goes well beyond ethics. We are in criminal territory here and the Congress has to act.
HARLOW: It's an interesting and important aiding and abetting point that you make.
Congresswoman Love, to you, let's talk about -- so we saw a clip of a little bit of what we'll see tonight in the hearing. Let's talk about who we're going to hear from, two people who were in the White House at the time, Matthew Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser for Trump, very high up, Sarah Matthews, former deputy press secretary. The final straw from Pottinger, we know from his recorded testimony, was that 2:24 P.M. tweet that Trump issued attacking Pence. We know for Sarah Matthews, she talked about that tweet as pouring gasoline on the fire.
How important is it to hear from them tonight? And I wonder what gaps you think the two of them testifying live before this committee and the world can fill?
MIA LOVE, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Today's testimony and hearing is going to be critically important. You hear Congresswoman Liz Cheney say that they're going to have a minute-by-minute walkthrough of the events on January 6th.
And just think about this for a moment. I worked with Mark Meadows. I worked with people that were working in the White House at the time during the 187 minutes. There are some people that worked for the president out of a sense of duty. There are some people that worked for the president because they believed in his vision. But these people that were there during the 187 minutes will go -- will tell the American people what was happening during that time.
The president had a duty, an obligation to stop. He may deny that he sent people in. He may deny that he incited the violence. But he cannot deny, no one in there can deny that he could have stopped it.
And going through this walkthrough is going to be critically important, not just for the American people to know, but the people that are baked in, the people that believed that the former president could do no wrong, has to understand that he has an obligation to save lives, and he did the opposite of that. It's going to be critically important.
SCIUTTO: The -- you were a former sitting Republican congresswoman. When we look at the polling, it seems to show that these hearings and the evidence is largely not moving Republican voters. But I always ask people like you, who speak to Republican voters and officials at the state level and elsewhere. In private, do you sense a change here? If not, more folks holding Trump responsible for what unfolded that day or at least are exhausted with what they're learning about the former president.
LOVE: I could say this with a clear conscience. If you think about this, Donald Trump running for president again is a nightmare for Republicans. It's a nightmare because we still -- there are still people who are constitutional conservatives. And we can go and look at what the president has done and it hasn't been -- I mean, he hasn't been as conservative, even when he was president. And now you have January 6th on top of that. It's a nightmare. And it would be a dream, actually, for former President Donald Trump to run again, would be a dream for Democrats.
We need leaders that are going to unite the nation. We need leaders that are going to -- we are not being threatened by external presence. We are going to be destroyed as a nation because we're going to destroy each other if we do not have leaders that unite us.
HARLOW: To the congresswoman's point, Richard, there is new CNN polling out this morning, and it's -- it's sad what it finds. It finds that most Americans think it is likely that some elected officials will successfully overturn elections because their party didn't win. I mean, you look at these numbers and you think, of course, they think seeing what happened in the lead-up to and on January 6th. But I wonder what you make of that and how much more critical it makes the bill, the bipartisan bill that was just put forward, to really protect against that.
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PAINTER: Well, either we want to live in a democracy or we do not. Either we believe in the founding principles embodied in the United States Constitution and the vision of our founders or we do not. There is nothing conservative about sedition and insurrection. This is extremely dangerous to tolerate this.
We had this in Germany in 1923, in a so-called (INAUDIBLE), which was sedition, an attempted insurrection and they only put Hitler and the others in the slammer for a couple of years. They should have put him in there for life. We cannot tolerate this in a democracy. And these people will try to come back.
There are plenty of conservatives, real conservatives who can run on the Republican ticket and represent conservative values and the platform of the party without bringing in seditionists and insurrectionists, and the Department of Justice has to act. Time is running out.
SCIUTTO: We're seeing that battle play out in a lot of Republican primaries this election cycle, and sometimes the election deniers are winning.
Do stay with us. There is much more to talk about.
We do want to give our viewers a closer look at the witnesses we just saw mentioned. There were senior officials in the Trump administration, Matthew Pottinger, deputy national security adviser, Sarah Matthews, deputy press secretary.
CNN National Correspondent Kristen Holmes details who they are and how critical their testimony could be.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, two former Trump White House officials who resigned after the deadly Capitol attack on January 6th, tomorrow, testifying publicly after talking to the committee behind closed doors.
MATTHEW POTTINGER, FORMER DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: One of my staff brought me a print-out of a tweet by the president. And the tweet said something to the effect that Mike Pence, the vice president, didn't have the courage to do what should have been done. I read that tweet and made a decision at that moment to resign. That's where I knew that I was leaving that day, once I read that tweet.
HOLMES: Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, served under Trump for four years. The former journalist and Marine was brought into the White House as a top Asia adviser by Michael Flynn, who he worked for in the military.
According to The New York Times, Pottinger told committee he alerted Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows the National Guard had still not arrived at the Capitol on January 6th.
Former Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews was one of several White House aides calling for Trump to condemn the violence on January 6th. A source tells CNN his inaction led to her resignation that night.
SARAH MATTHEWS, FORMER DEPUTY WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: He said that we could make the RINOs do the right thing is the way he phrased it. And no one spoke up initially, because I think everyone was trying to process what he meant by that.
HOLMES: Now, she will testify about what she experienced in the White House that day.
MATTHEWS: It was clear that it was escalating and escalating quickly. So, then when that tweet, the Mike Pence tweet, was sent out, I remember us saying that that was the last thing that needed to be tweeted at that moment. The situation was already bad, and so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.
HOLMES: The Kent State graduate has spent her adult life working in Republican politics, spending her college summers interning for Ohio Senator Rob Portman, then-Speaker of the House John Boehner, and helping with the 2016 Republican convention, joining Trump's re- election campaign before being brought over to the White House by Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Their testimony comes after that of another young White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whose bombshell revelations sent shockwaves through Washington.
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HOLMES (on camera): Now, those two witnesses along with former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, whose video testimony we expect to see large portions of today, that will help that focus again on the 187 minutes. This is a look at what was going on behind the scenes at the White House at that time, particularly as that violence was unfolding at the Capitol. Jim and Poppy?
HARLOW: Kristen Holmes, thanks very much for the reporting.
And as we discussed this hearing tonight, you can see all of the live coverage. Our special coverage this evening, it begins at 7:00 Eastern Time as the January 6th committee turns to President Trump's conduct during the attack on the Capitol.
Still to come, lawmakers take steps to ensure another vice president never face what Mike Pence did on January 6. What is being pitched on Capitol Hill for election protection, ahead.
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SCIUTTO: Yes, this could be real progress.
Plus, chased and then shot in the back, a tragic police encounter leaves a 13-year-old paralyzed. CNN exclusively obtained that body camera footage. Why Chicago police say they thought he had a weapon, when witnesses and his lawyer say his hands were up.
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SCIUTTO: First on CNN, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general has now told the Secret Service to stop its own investigation into the potentially deleted text messages requested by the January 6th committee.
HARLOW: It's a really significant development.
Let's get straight to CNN Law Enforcement Correspondent Whitney Wild.
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Whitney, this is your reporting, and this is according to a letter you obtained. Is that right? What can you tell us?
WHITNEY WILD, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CORRESPONDENT: This is a letter reviewed by CNN. And what it says is that the Department of Homeland Security inspector general has directed the Secret Service to stop its internal investigations into what happened to text messages related to January 6th that may have been deleted.
The inspector general wrote that the Secret Service should stop investigating this matter, that includes obtaining devices, that includes ceasing any interviews, because the inspector general feels that this effort could interfere with the inspector general's own investigation into what happened to that agency's text messages.
The letter adds to this growing tension, this growing complication for the Secret Service, and particularly tension between the Secret Service and the DHS inspector general over, again, the potential that there were text messages missing from this very crucial timeline, which the Secret Service has continued to say, if there were text messages, they were inadvertently lost due to a data migration.
This is certainly very complicated for the Secret Service, Poppy and Jim, because we know there are other oversight bodies who are now requesting the Secret Service investigate this themselves. They have request from the House select committee to look into this. They now are under direction from the National Archives to investigate this. So, certainly, adding to the tension here, a very complicated situation for the Secret Service. Back to you.
And it's important to note, this letter came in Wednesday, Wednesday night, yesterday.
SCIUTTO: Whitney Wild, good and important reporting.
Let's bring back former White House Ethics Lawyer Richard Painter, and also CNN Political Commentator, former GOP Congresswoman Mia Love.
Richard, if I could go to you, I mean, at a minimum here, it strikes me that this is clumsy cooperation with the request that they received soon after January 6th, 2021 to preserve all documents. At worst, there's something nefarious going on here. Based on what you've seen so far, what questions do you have about the Secret Service?
PAINTER: I'm very surprised at this. The Secret Service is charged with protecting the president of the United States and other senior government officials. And if they can't be competent enough to keep their texts and preserve their own texts, they have no idea what they're doing and I don't trust them with the safety of the president of the United States. So, if this was really inadvertent, it is incredibly stupid and sloppy for this to have happened at the Secret Service.
The other theory, of course, is that somebody did this intentionally, because they wanted to cover for Donald Trump and not expose Donald Trump to prosecution because of evidence provided by the Secret Service. There are those in the Secret Service who may believe that their loyalty to the president is so intense that it would actually conceal the fact that the president was committing a crime.
And I know the Secret Service agents record presidential affairs and love twists and things like that in the past, but this is different. This is evidence of criminal insurrection, as I pointed in the previous segment. And for the Secret Service to just delete the texts is shocking.
HARLOW: Congresswoman Love, if I could get your take on what I brought up last segment, which is, in the wake of all this, and missing, at least at this point, text messages, missing information from the January 6th committee, you do have a bipartisan effort that is backed by five Republicans and seven Democrats in the Senate, to protect election integrity. It's twofold.
The first part makes explicitly clear in the Electoral Count Act, sort of upping it to say the vice president only has a ceremonial role in certifying the election, so that someone doesn't get into the same predicament Pence was in. And the second part of that it would enhance federal protections for anyone -- or federal penalties rather for anyone who tries to intimidate or threaten election officials, who tries to tamper with election records.
To see the bipartisan support for that in this moment, I wonder how important you think that is, and if it makes you hopeful in the midst of a lot that clearly doesn't.
LOVE: Okay. So --
HARLOW: All right. Okay, we do have breaking news, I'm sorry. We have breaking news. We have just learned Joe Biden has been tested positive for COVID-19.
Let's get straight to Jeremy Diamond at the White House. How is the president's health overall? Obviously, he's fully vaccinated, boosted. But he did just come off this big overseas trip.
JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Listen, this is obviously very significant news, but also very different from when we had a president of the United States last test positive for COVID, that was when President Trump had it, that was before he had been vaccinated.
In this case, Joe Biden is vaccinated and he is double boosted, but he is experiencing, we're told, very mild symptoms, according to the White House. And he has begun taking a course of that antiviral Paxlovid treatment.
[10:25:02]
Let me read you part of this statement from the White House that we have just gotten moments ago, saying that consistent with CDC guidelines, he will isolate at the White House and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time. They say that he's been in contact with White House staff by phone this morning, and he'll participate in his planned meetings from the White House via phone and via Zoom from the residence.
The White House also says that consistent with protocol, he'll continue to work in isolation until he tests negative. And once he tests negative, he'll return to in-person work.
The White House did tell us just yesterday, I believe, or perhaps it was the day before, that President Biden had tested negative for coronavirus. So, he has been getting regularly tested, including as he returned from that overseas trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
But now, President Joe Biden has, for the first time, tested positive for coronavirus. He's experiencing very mild symptoms, according to the White House, and he is now undergoing a course of that Paxlovid treatment, which is considered the gold standard in coronavirus treatment right now. But, again, very significant news, President Joe Biden, age 79, testing positive for coronavirus.
SCIUTTO: Jeremy diamond, has the White House provided any more details on what exactly very mild symptoms, as they describe, are?
DIAMOND: I'm reading this statement along with you guys right now. And it looks like all they're saying so far is very mild symptoms. They did not describe those symptoms. But, clearly, they're trying to indicate that President Biden is well enough to continue working from the White House, again, in isolation, at the residence of the White House, not in the west wing alongside staff.
And, listen, it's notable that it has taken this long, frankly, for Joe Biden to get COVID. So many Americans have already gotten this virus. But the protocols at the White House around him have been very, very strict. Every meeting that President Biden has had with aides in the Oval Office, people wear masks, they wear N-95 masks typically when they are around him. But, of course, we know that he has been increasing his public engagements in recent months.
I was with him in Cleveland a couple of months ago where he was on a selfie line taking pictures with folks, hugging, handshakes, sometimes kissing folks. And so, obviously, his exposure has increased in recent months, as it did during that overseas trip just last week to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
HARLOW: So, Jeremy, just looking at the end of this statement that you're reading, as you said, alongside with us from the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, the last sentence says the president last previously tested for COVID was Tuesday. His previous test was Tuesday when he had a negative result. We just showed video, and I think Marty in the control room and queue it back up from yesterday, from Wednesday. You see him there with john kerry and others. So are all those in contact with the president, right? You see him there with John Kerry and others.
And so my question to you is, I suppose, all that are in contact with the president are also tested regularly?
DIAMOND: Yes. So, anybody who does need to go and meet with the president indoors at the White House is tested beforehand for COVID. It's usually a rapid antigen test that's performed, it's performed on members of the press who are traveling with the president in what's called the press pool, those 13 reporters and photographers who travel in very close quarters with the president, including aboard Air Force One. Those folks are always tested with a rapid test on the day that they are going to be in contact or traveling with the president. I presume that the White House will be doing contact tracing around those officials who are with him, some of those members who traveled and flew with the president on Air Force One. Again, Air Force One is also still requiring masks on board, even though that federal travel mask mandate has fallen, of course, for commercial flights. The White House has insisted on maintaining masks aboard Air Force One.
So, obviously, again, a lot of protocols that have been taking place but, clearly, President Biden has still managed to get COVID at this point for the first time, of course, in his presidency and for the first time since this pandemic.
SCIUTTO: Jeremy Diamond, thanks so much. Please stay with us.
Joining us now, Dr. William Schaffner via telephone. And this is notable, of course, because, listen, the country has been experiencing quite a surge in COVID cases, in many places, even exceeding where it was at the previous peak. But tell us, what are the risks to a 79- year-old man who is vaccinated and boosted to get COVID today?
DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER, PROFESSOR, DIVISION OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER (voice over): Well, people who are vaccinated and boosted, Jim, can still get mild cases of COVID infection. These new variants, particularly the BA.5 variant, can infect people who were previously vaccinated or people who have had previous natural infection. That said, the infections then are generally rather mild.
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They don't require hospitalization.
