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Rudy Giuliani Appears Before GA Special Grand Jury; New Law Tackling Climate Change Comes As West Faces Dire Drought. Aired 3- 3:30p ET

Aired August 17, 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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[15:01:26]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: It's the top of the hour on CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Alisyn Camerota.

At this hour, two former lawyers for Donald Trump are facing the subpoena power of Georgia special grand jury looking into Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state. Right now, Rudy Giuliani is testifying before that grand jury after learning he is the target of their investigation.

In the meantime, conservative lawyer John Eastman is trying to avoid the grand jury. He has a hearing right now in New Mexico to fight that subpoena. Both men along with other Trump advisors who've been summoned, echoed election fallacies that Trump votes were somehow stolen.

CNN's Sara Murray is outside the Fulton courthouse where Giuliani has been - is it six hours now, Sara?

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. He's been back there for a while since about 9 am is when they got rolling. And, look, before he went in, his attorney was pretty clear that if these prosecutors thought they were going to ask Rudy Giuliani anything about his conversations with former President Trump who is, of course, a former client of Giuliani, that they were delusional. And here's what Giuliani had to say for himself to my colleague, Nick Valencia, when he was on his way in this morning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Mr. Giuliani, when you met with Georgia lawmakers, did you lie to them?

RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER TRUMP LAWYER: We will not talk about this until it's over. It's the grand jury and grand juries, as I recall a secret.

VALENCIA: Do you believe President Trump is the ultimate target of this investigation?

GIULIANI: I'm not going to comment on the grand jury investigation.

VALENCIA: What do you think their ultimate goal is here?

GIULIANI: (Inaudible) about it.

VALENCIA: What are you expecting to talk about here today?

GIULIANI: Well, they ask the questions and we'll see.

VALENCIA: Will you be cooperative? I mean, your attorney in New York says you can't promise how responsive you'll be.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Inaudible) goodbye.

GIULIANI: Yes, Mayor Giuliani, yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MURRAY: Now, investigators have been looking into Rudy Giuliani's multiple appearances before Georgia lawmakers after the 2020 election where he spread conspiracies about 2020. Obviously, he's now been informed he's a target of this investigation. So we will see what questions, if any, he answers from prosecutors today, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: And Sara, also in this hour, John Eastman, another Trump attorney is scheduled to be in court. Explain what's going on with that case.

MURRAY: That's right. He is scheduled to be in court in New Mexico. That is where he's trying to challenge a subpoena. The subpoena has to go there because John Eastman doesn't live in Georgia, but prosecutors in Georgia want to see him here before the special grand jury. So Eastern is going to try to make an effort to get that subpoena quashed.

And look, we have seen a lot of people in the Trump orbit tried to do this. For instance, Jenna Ellis, another one of these attorneys who was working with the Trump campaign tried to have her subpoena quashed in Colorado. She was not successful. A judge there said she still has to go to Georgia. She still has to appear before the grand jury, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Sara Murray, thank you very much. So former Vice President, Mike Pence just opened up the possibility that he might be willing to speak to the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. He made the comments at an event in Manchester, New Hampshire where our Athena Jones is standing by. So what exactly did he say Athena?

ATHENA JONES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Alisyn. Well, after his speech, the vice president took some questions from the event organizer and a few from the audience and he was asked if the January 6 Committee is performing a public service and how he would respond if asked to testify.

Well, Pence said he would give any formal invitation to testify some due consideration he said, but he also hinted a potential executive privilege issues. Here's more of what he said. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE PENCE, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it. But you've heard me mentioned the Constitution a few times this morning.

[15:05:05]

On the Constitution we have three co-equal branches of government. And any invitation that'd be directed to me, I would have to reflect on the unique role that I was serving as vice president. It'd be unprecedented in history for a vice president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill. But as I said, I don't want to prejudge.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JONES: So he says he doesn't want to prejudge, but he would give it due consideration. But a person with knowledge of Pence's thinking cautions us against reading too much into that. The source telling my colleague Gloria Borger that the vice president would have serious constitutional issues with appearing before the January 6 Committee pointing to those remarks you just heard him make about coequal branches of government and having to give serious thought to his role.

This person also said that Pence believes that much of the information related to his experience on January 6 is something the Committee already has because he's then chief of staff, Marc Short, and one of his lawyers, Gregory - Greg Jacob, have already testified in full before the Committee. As for the January 6 Committee, they have not responded to a request for comment about Pence's remarks. Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: Okay. It's helpful to have you read between the lines there of exactly what he was saying. Meanwhile, he also shared his thoughts about the FBI search at Mar-A-Lago for the classified and the top secret documents. What did he say about that?

JONES: Well, he reiterated his call for Attorney General Merrick Garland to give the American people a full accounting of the reasons behind that search, why it was necessary to carry out that search in that manner. He said that unprecedented action demands unprecedented transparency, but he also defended the rank and file, listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PENCE: And on the wake of the four years that we endured, the politicization of the FBI, the American people have a right to know the basis for this. This unprecedented action does demand unprecedented transparency. These attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JONES: Now, Pence did not make any announcements about his own political future and he ignored repeated questions from CNN and others, including what message Liz Cheney's defeat sends to Republicans who don't embrace Donald Trump's election lies, Alisyn? CAMEROTA: Okay. Athena Jones, thank you.

JONES: (Inaudible) ...

CAMEROTA: Thank you very much. All right. Joining me now is Page Pate, the constitutional law and criminal defense attorney and Peter Licata. He served as an FBI Supervisory Special Agent and is now a CNN Law Enforcement Analyst. Great to see both of you.

So Page, Rudy Giuliani has been in there for six hours, that's a long time to say I plead the Fifth. Well, I mean, what do you think is happening in there?

PAGE PATE, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Well, Alisyn, it is a long time to plead the Fifth, but it's possible, I think one of two things have been happening today. Either the District Attorney is requiring Giuliani to literally invoke the Fifth Amendment to every conceivable question they could ask him or he tried initially to invoke attorney- client privilege and the DA is challenging that assertion.

Here in Georgia, just like in federal court, there's an exception to attorney-client privilege, when the lawyer and the client are discussing a potential crime or defrauding someone. So if he tried to raise attorney-client privilege and the DA did not want to accept that they may have had to go to the judge for almost each and every question.

So we don't know what's happening in the room. It is secret. It's not a situation where lawyers can be in there, just the DA, the grand jurors and witness. So potentially, we'll find out afterwards though.

CAMEROTA: Okay. That's really interesting background. So Peter, one of the crimes that Fani Willis, the Fulton County DA, is investigating is whether Giuliani made false statements to Georgia officials and Georgia lawmakers in some of these hearings that he appeared in after the election. And this is not a mystery. We have this on videotape. So let me just play one example of some of the things that he tried to say to lawmakers then.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GIULIANI: How can they say there's no fraud? Look at that woman. Look at her taking those ballots out. Look at them scurrying around with the ballots. Nobody in the room hiding around. They look like this - they look like they're passing out dope not just ballots. It is quite clear they're stealing votes and it's bad enough that the Democratic Party is covering it up.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Okay. None of that was true. So I mean, as an investigator, is that what you call a smoking gun?

PETER LICATA, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Oh, false statements are false statements, so yes, none of it turned out to be true. These are the questions that the prosecutor needs to ask Mr. Giuliani and hold him to what he said. So, again, it's just more - it ends up being a lot of spin at the time, and sound bites, and just things to try to cause a stir, right?

[15:10:06]

So we'll see what the - what comes out of the grand jury, we probably won't see that for a while as it is a secret proceeding. But we'll see what happens and what Mr. Giuliani needs - has to say when the grand jury is complete.

CAMEROTA: Page, how strong do you think that evidence is?

PATE: I think it's particularly strong. I mean, there is a Georgia crime for making a false statement in an official proceeding and that not only can be a separate felony offense, but perhaps more importantly in this investigation, it can be the predicate act for a racketeering charge. And everything we've seen about this grand jury, the witnesses that had been called, the filings that have been made in court, I think the District Attorney is trying to build a RICO case. And so each one of these false statements could be a predicate act for subsequent RICO indictment.

CAMEROTA: Peter, I want to ask you about what former Vice President Pence said today about the search of Donald Trump's Mar-A-Lago home and the finding of something like 20 boxes of classified and top secret documents and the effect that all of that has had in terms of threats to the FBI, here's this one.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PENCE: I also want to remind my fellow Republicans, we can hold the Attorney General accountable for the decision that he made without attacking rank and file law enforcement personnel at the FBI. The Republican Party is the party of law and order.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: As a former agent, is that a strong enough statement to you to bring down the temperature?

LICATA: Well, yes. Well, it helps. It's - we asked - we talked about this in previous segments, it's - these politicians need to be leaders and I'm actually happy to hear former Vice President Pence come out and be one of the first people to say, Republicans, politicians all need to stop attacking law enforcement and the FBI. The FBI rank and file are doing the right job.

They - if their leaders are trying to politicize the organization, that's one thing, but the organization itself and those people, the agents and employees, 35,000 employees that are doing their job every day needs to prevent from being politicized. So we need more politicians to come out and support the bureau in what we're doing.

One must remember that the FBI as well as any other federal law enforcement are only acting on the procedures and laws that Congress wrote. So it's easy to slam us but we're only following the laws that Congress put into effect.

CAMEROTA: And this just into our newsroom, Giuliani has now left the courthouse. He is done with appearing in front of the grand jury and he did not speak to reporters on his way out.

One last thing, Page, so tomorrow, the judge who approved that Mar-A- Lago search warrant is going to be holding a special hearing on whether or not to unseal the affidavit. As you know, the Attorney General does not want the affidavit unsealed. Do you think that there's a world in which a judge would unseal that knowing that we may be talking about national security and classified documents?

PATE: I think it's very unlikely, Alisyn, even if this was not a national security investigation. It's almost unheard of for a judge to unseal the affidavit in support of a search warrant while the investigation is ongoing before anyone who's been charged. Obviously, there's something different about this case. There's a lot of public attention, a lot of calls for transparency.

But if the government objects to it, I don't see the judge releasing it unless there is substantial redaction. Black lines over 90 percent of the affidavit but that's probably all we're going to see at this point.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Page Pate, Peter Licata, thank you both very much for all of the information.

All right. Meanwhile, tension is building between water managers out west and the government over sweeping new restrictions to tackle extreme drought. President Biden's national climate adviser is going to join us next on the next steps.

Plus, a teenager in Florida with no parents is denied an abortion and deemed not mature enough to make the decision to end her own pregnancy.

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[15:18:47]

CAMEROTA: The climate measures and the new Inflation Reduction Act could not come at a more urgent time. The U.S. government is ordering western states to cut back their water usage after the Colorado River Basin is facing dire drought conditions, so dire, the region's water supply could collapse.

Provisions in this new law are aimed at reversing current climate trends. The goal is to decrease U.S. carbon emissions by 40 percent by the year 2030. By offering a range of incentives and tax credits for consumers and corporations to switch to sources of clean energy like electric vehicles, nuclear power, clean hydrogen among other things.

Joining us now is Gina McCarthy. She's the White House National Climate Advisor and a former EPA Administrator. Ms. McCarthy, so good to see you. Obviously, this law is a legislative win for the White House and for Democrats. But frankly, it feels so desperate right now, the climate situation, I mean, every day I'm reporting on water supply issues, on record heat waves, on droughts in some places or flooding, historic flooding in other places. I don't know if we have until two 2030 for some of the impact of this law to take hold.

[15:20:03]

GINA MCCARTHY, WHITE HOUSE NATIONAL CLIMATE ADVISOR: Well, hopefully some of the impact of this law will take hold well before 2030. Look, Alisyn, we never said 40 percent was our goal. We know we have to do more. The President set a goal to get to 50 percent by 2030. This bill gets us a long way there.

But you're right, the challenges that we're seeing today are really more dramatic and they get more dramatic every year. We're talking about wildfires that are devastating these same areas. We're talking about these droughts. The only thing that we can do is to make sure that we take action, and we work with states hand in hand to make sure we're tackling the problems that already exist.

But this bill, the IRA is about making sure that it doesn't get worse. It's about $370 billion dollars in investments. And in between this in a bipartisan infrastructure law, there is - there are significant resources that are going to go to states to deal with this question. The droughts, the wildfires, the resilience, there are billions of dollars in investments, he had to tackle this.

But you're not wrong, I wish we had passed this 20 years ago. But we are where we are and this is a magnificent leap forward to begin to address this problem, both retrospectively looking at the resilience challenges, but also even more importantly to make sure that we're working together to actually take steps on climate and tackle this crisis, but in ways that save families money, in ways that grow new jobs, in ways that advance our domestic manufacturing, in ways that address the environmental justice challenges that we're facing. None of these are easy, but this makes it much - this makes us have a fighting chance right out of the gate.

CAMEROTA: How much of this law is dependent upon personal initiative is dependent upon someone deciding to put solar panels on their own home or someone deciding to buy an electric car?

MCCARTHY: Well, I think that most of this is all about making sure that the choice to clean energy is the one that's most beneficial, not for the planet, but for people themselves. So we're not asking people to take risks or make sacrifices. We're looking at the cost of clean energy and lowering that.

One of the most important provisions is in supporting the manufacturing and deployment of clean energy right here in the United States, because it grows jobs, it also allows us to be more competitive against China. So we're domestically producing these products, not just growing jobs, but making them available to our families at lower cost.

So when you talk about electric vehicles, sure, we're going to advise people to buy them, because they lower greenhouse gas emissions, but they're going to buy them because they're cheaper. They're going to buy them because they perform better. So there is a balance here that we're putting in that's making sure that we're not asking people to do anything other than to look at price tags, look at energy savings and this rebate programs that actually come into play right away, this tax credit opportunities that come into play and we're going to make sure that people understand how they can access those.

So I'm not suggesting that the only motivation for people is money, but it's going to make a world of difference if clean energy is the winner in our economy. Everything from how you generate energy and how you save money in your homes, in your buildings.

CAMEROTA: One of the - I'm glad you brought up China, because one of the things that I think makes people feel particularly helpless and hopeless about all of this is that we can do - we can compost our heart out. We can buy an electric car. We can individually do all these things, but China is the number one polluter.

And if China isn't contributing to saving the Earth, maybe all of these things around the margins aren't going to help.

MCCARTHY: Well, Alisyn, we have to have every country step forward. We lost a lot of ground, a lot of credibility in the prior administration. Part of the sort of enthusiasm and energy today is that I think we all know that this put us back on the map, that pushed the U.S. back in a leadership position, we will continue to negotiate with China and get them into the program.

But frankly, we had to have something big. We had to take a big leap forward. This is the biggest piece of legislation that our country has ever advanced by 10 times as much in terms of reductions of any other law. But it frankly is being looked at internationally as perhaps the biggest and most significant step forward, not just in the United States, but in our international community.

This is the only way we are going to get China to the table is if we are outcompete them and we outsmart them moving forward.

[15:25:05]

That's what this is all about. We'll capture the clean energy economy and they'll have to figure out how they then rejoin the community of countries that know that we have to take action on climate internationally. It is a worldwide challenge, not an individual country challenge.

CAMEROTA: Gina McCarthy, thank you very much for all of the information.

MCCARTHY: Thanks, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: The CDC announcing a major overhaul and an attempt to restore trust in the agency. Plus, new details on a new COVID booster, how soon you can get it, whether you need it and how protected you'll be from future variants.

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