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Nuclear Disaster Fears in Ukraine; Trigger Abortion Bans Take Effect in Three States; Economic Outlook; DOJ Submits Proposal For Redacted Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired August 25, 2022 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:00]

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN HOST: In response, U.S. helicopters returned fire, destroying three vehicles and killing four people involved in the attack.

And thank you for joining INSIDE POLITICS.

Bianna Golodryga is picking up our coverage right now.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN HOST: Hello, everyone. I'm Bianna Golodryga in New York. Ana Cabrera is off.

Right now, a federal judge in Florida has a redacted version of the affidavit behind the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The Justice Department has submitted under seal its proposal for what it thinks the public should and shouldn't know about the search. Now it's up to the judge to have the final say, but the DOJ has been very clear it wants as little as possible revealed to protect witnesses and the investigation.

CNN's Katelyn Polantz joins us now.

Katelyn, what more do we know about what happens next, now that the judge has this in hand?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: While, Bianna, it could be some time before we see anything here from this process, this process where the Justice Department is proposing redactions for this affidavit that will detail the investigation up to the point where they decided they needed to go and search and seize documents out of Mar-a-Lago.

This filing, it did come in under seal. The judge will take a look at it. There could be days or weeks of waiting ahead for us on this. But as this process goes on, the judge is sitting in for the public, the public interest, the historical interest as well.

And the media and others are pushing for some level of transparency here because of what we already know about this unprecedented search of Mar-a-Lago.

At the same time, the Justice Department, we know that they are arguing for a great deal of secrecy around this investigation. It's an ongoing criminal investigation, one that they want to protect. And first and foremost, they have made very clear in the proceedings they want to protect witnesses, both people who've spoken to them are already and people who could help them in the future.

So there's a lot of things that the judge is considering going forward. And we just don't know whenever there will be an outcome. It might have to wait until criminal charges could be filed, if that day comes -- Bianna.

GOLODRYGA: Of course, you will be following all of this for us. The DOJ wanted none of this unsealed.

Katelyn Polantz, thank you.

Well, here to discuss, former FBI agent David Shapiro and CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig.

Elie, let me start with you.

So walk us more through this decision process now that the judge is going through this redacted form, mindful of the fact that the judge has already seen this affidavit.

ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, Bianna, so one of really three things can happen now.

One, the judge might agree with the redactions that DOJ has proposed and said, this is appropriate. I agree with what you want to keep out. I agree with what you're OK disclosing. And then, if that happens, the judge could just make the part that's not redacted public. That could happen theoretically today. It may take days. It may take more than days.

Option number two is, the judge may say these redactions are just so deep and go so wide that I don't think there's any way we can release this at all. The judge actually reserved that in his order. He said, so it may be that the redactions are so extensive that there's just no way to release this.

And the third possibility is, the judge may disagree with DOJ and say, I want to redact -- I want to make more of this public than you do, DOJ, in which case DOJ may choose to try to appeal this to a district court judge.

So those are the three possibilities. We could see this as soon as today or it could be weeks or months.

GOLODRYGA: Yes.

And, David, so we could very well see a Swiss cheese version of the initial affidavit, given these redactions that the DOJ has now submitted and now the judge is going to be analyzing.

All of that having been said, at some point, we will see this affidavit. So walk us through the process of what we're expecting or what you expect the DOJ to have submitted here and what they may be willing to go public with, knowing that, at some point, all of this is going to be public.

DAVID SHAPIRO, FORMER FBI AGENT: Well, thank you, Bianna, for having me on this afternoon.

I think what we will see eventually, as you indicated, is the detail of information and belief. Essentially, this search warrant application will contain many details that are supported by witnesses and other forms of intelligence gathering that support the probable cause for the search.

So we will see the details. We will find out the whos, the whens, the how, the what-fors, but maybe not so soon.

GOLODRYGA: So, given that we will eventually see it, what do you expect in the interim for the DOJ to be OK with the public seeing right now?

SHAPIRO: Well, the DOJ is making both illegal and political decision.

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And I am concerned that this may set a bad precedent. As anyone who's been to law school learns on the second day, tough cases make bad law. So I think there is a risk to the proper investigative techniques to gathering evidence, to other cases. This is just an unprecedented request and would be highly unusual, which is not to say that judge shouldn't fairly consider it.

GOLODRYGA: So, Elie, let's talk about this process as a whole, because we now know the former President Trump and his legal team were told multiple times, including through roughly a dozen e-mails going back to the spring of 2021, by the National Archives that these documents needed to be returned.

Trump's own White House lawyer at the time, Pat Cipollone, even told him that there were concerns even before he left the White House about this. Now we know that Cipollone is cooperating with the DOJ. How concerned so should the former president be, given that?

HONIG: Well, Bianna, there's really two different issues here, because Donald Trump and his supporters and his legal team have attacked this search warrant.

And there's the legal question and the political question. Legally, all you need to do as a prosecutor, as an FBI agent is establish probable cause that a crime was committed and the likelihood that you will find evidence where you go into search. They did that here. We have seen those forms. We know that a judge reviewed and signed off.

If there's ever a charge, Donald Trump will have the opportunity to challenge that. Politically, the complaint here has been that DOJ was overly aggressive, took too strong of a step when they went to a search warrant.

But I think all these disclosures that we're now finding out tell us that, if anything, DOJ was remarkably sort of slow to get to a search warrant. I mean, this negotiation, this back-and-forth went on for over a year. DOJ tried it the nice way. Archives tried it the nice way. They negotiated. They used a subpoena, until, finally, two weeks ago and change, that's when they use the search warrant.

So I think this whole narrative that the search warrant was this sudden explosive step just doesn't hold up.

GOLODRYGA: Yes, we -- and we now see this timeline, David, all of these warnings, all of these opportunities granted to the former present that would have never been granted to anyone else over a year- and-a-half now here.

And we also had that filing from the former president and his legal team earlier this week, where they said that they were fully cooperative and surprised, almost why didn't they just come to us and ask for these in the first place kind of mentality in response.

How do those two factor in now, given that we have a clearer picture of that timeline?

SHAPIRO: Well, the clear picture is as you established it.

And Mr. Trump and his legal advisers are, in a sense, supporting what everybody seems to believe. That is that these are dilatory tactics merely to extend the day of reckoning. And nothing that has happened so far on the end of Mr. Trump suggests anything otherwise, that it's just procrastinate, delay, defer, and maybe it'll go away.

GOLODRYGA: We have another deadline to hear from the former president's team tomorrow. In the meantime, we will wait to hear from this judge today.

David Shapiro, thank you.

Elie, stay with us because we have new insight now into another controversial legal decision concerning Donald Trump.

CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez joins us now.

So, Evan, this goes back to the Mueller report involving the Russia investigation and whether then-President Trump was obstructing justice. What new have we learned here?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is a 2019 memo that the courts finally ordered the Justice Department to release. They said that this memo that went to Bill Barr -- this came from other top officials at the Justice Department explaining why the Justice Department should not charge the former president with obstruction of justice.

And, according to the judges who looked at this, they said, Bill Barr had already made a decision not to charge Trump and that this memo, really, what they called it was an academic exercise and a thought experiment.

And you will see why. On this nine pages, you see they go through -- the basic point that they make is that because Trump was not charged with collusion with the Russians, therefore, he cannot be charged with obstruction.

I will read you just a part of what they write: "The special counsel's obstruction theory would not be -- would not only be novel, but, based on his own analysis, it would be unusual, because volume one of the special counsel's report is conclusive that the evidence developed was not sufficient to charge that any member of the Trump campaign, including the president, conspired or coordinated with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election."

Bianna, this analysis goes through a number of instances that really made huge news, including the effort by the former president to get people to not -- quote, unquote -- "flip" on him. According to the lawyers of the Justice Department, this is really explained by the fact that Trump believed that this investigation was overshadowing his presidency, and he didn't want people to make things up against him.

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It's an interesting analysis that is done. But, clearly, the former attorney general, Bill Barr, had already decided that this investigation was not -- did not have merit, and he didn't believe they should charge anything.

GOLODRYGA: Yes, he issued that report rather quickly at the time.

PEREZ: Right.

GOLODRYGA: Evan Perez, thank you.

So let's bring Elie back in with us.

Elie, what strikes you most about this new revelation?

HONIG: Well, Bianna, we already knew that Bill Barr lied to the American public about Robert Mueller's report. Don't take it from me. Robert Mueller himself said that. Numerous federal judges said that.

Now we know that Bill Barr lied about those lies to the court, because the focus here is this memo that Evan talked about, this nine-page memo. And what happened was a group -- a transparency group sued to get this memo.

And so DOJ under Barr went into court and said, this is what we call a deliberative memo. This is something that the attorney general studied and thought about and relied on when he was making his decision not to charge Donald Trump and to say there's no obstruction.

Well, the district court looked at that, the district judge, and said, no, that's not what this is. This is a CYA memo. This is a cover your blank memo that was completed only after the fact. It was already a done deal that they were not going to charge Trump.

And then, yesterday, a court of appeals agreed. They said that's not what this is. You misled us about what this document is. We have now seen the memo. The reasoning in it is completely thin, and the sort of pretext for withholding it by Bill Barr has been exposed.

GOLODRYGA: Elie Honig, thank you so much for breaking it down for us. We appreciate it.

HONIG: Thanks, Bianna.

GOLODRYGA: Well, the U.S. economy just shrank, but it wasn't as bad as expected, and jobless claims just dropped, but there is still a big cloud hanging over this economy. More details straight ahead.

Plus, it has the potential to spark nuclear disaster, and it's already happened twice. Why power keeps getting cut to a Ukrainian power plant and why that's a major problem for all of Europe.

Also, dumping the pump and plugging E.V.s, more on California's plan to ban gas-powered car sales by 2035.

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GOLODRYGA: So here's what we know. The U.S. economy is shrinking. But it's shrinking slower than we first thought.

CNN's Matt Egan is here with me to break it all down.

So if it's confusing to viewers at home, it's confusing to a lot of people who follow this closely, like you do. This is a strange economy.

MATT EGAN, CNN REPORTER: It really is, Bianna.

So, these new numbers, they are gloomy, just not as gloomy as we thought. Now, we're talking about GDP, which is kind of like the quarterly report card for the economy. And what we learned today is that it actually got upgraded for the spring quarter. This revision is based on some more comprehensive data that came out than when this was first announced the month ago.

And it turns out, consumers, they spent more money than originally estimated. That is good news. I think the bad news here is that, despite the upgrade, we're still talking about negative growth. The economy actually shrank. And this is not a one-off. This is actually the second straight quarter of negative GDP, as you can see on your screen there.

And that is a big deal because there is a rule of thumb that if you have back-to-back quarters of negative GDP, then the economy is in recession. Now, this rule of thumb has a good track record. But it's still -- it's just the rule of thumb, right? Recessions are declared by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

And they look at a wide range of metrics, including jobs.

GOLODRYGA: Unemployment, right.

EGAN: Exactly.

And the jobs market, by all accounts, still remain strong. And new numbers out today show that unemployment claims, first-time jobless claims, they actually fell for the second week in a row at 243,000. They have gone up since the historic lows in March, but they're still very healthy. And despite these reports of layoffs, we're not seeing any hard evidence of widespread firing.

And until that changes, and, hopefully, it doesn't, but until that does, it's hard to see how you can argue that this is a recession.

GOLODRYGA: Yes, we have never seen a recession where you see the unemployment rate so low.

EGAN: Right.

GOLODRYGA: But this is all attributed to the pandemic, right? And we have never been in this specific situation as well.

And we're learning more information about the impact of long COVID and what that's having for workers out there who continue to sit out from the work force because of it.

EGAN: Right, right.

And despite the fact that society in a lot of ways has gone back to normal, COVID still is casting the shadow over the economy. And a lot of it is because of long COVID. There's all of these symptoms that would make it really difficult to work.

Listen to some of these symptoms and imagine working with them, brain fog, anxiety, depression, fatigue, breathing difficulty, sleep disorders. And the Brookings Institution put out a report saying that they estimate 16 million working-age Americans have long COVID today, and two to four million people are out of work because of long COVID.

Now, that is a significant number. Even if you just take the midpoint, three million, that's almost 2 percent of the entire U.S. civilian labor force. And Brookings estimates that the absence of these workers, it's translating to the loss of $168 billion in lost earnings a year, $168 billion.

Now, no wonder why so many sectors are dealing with a shortage of workers. You think about restaurants, transportation, education, factories, hotels. All of them have a lot of unfilled jobs. And this is something that impacts all of us, because the lack of workers is contributing to the worst inflation that we have seen in 40 years.

GOLODRYGA: Yes, listen, I had some of that brain fog when I had COVID. Luckily, it was just for a couple of days, but I couldn't imagine having come back to work.

And we're sort of learning more and more about the impact of long COVID. It's frightening.

EGAN: It is. GOLODRYGA: Matt Egan, great to see you. Thanks for breaking it down.

EGAN: Thank, Bianna.

GOLODRYGA: Well, abortion access will be even more difficult for millions of women in several states starting today.

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Trigger laws in Idaho, Tennessee and Texas will effectively ban abortions with few exceptions. North Dakota and Oklahoma will enact similar measures later this week.

CNN's Tom Foreman is here to break it all down for us.

So, Tom, tell us what's going on in all these states.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, what's going on is a continuation of what we have watched as states have moved into the restrictive, the very restrictive, or the most restrictive phase of this.

In these states, there are certain issues that are in play right now. In Idaho, they're going into a legal battle over a portion of it. They put in a very restrictive set of anti-abortion rules or rules to stop abortion there. They're at war with the federal government, in that their rules here say, if a woman is in the emergency room and a doctor says, I have to save your life, then they can perform an abortion, although they can still be charged and have to defend themselves in court and say, well, I have to justify that I was saving her life.

Federal law for emergency rooms says, no, you have to do it not only for saving life, but if there's going to be significant impairment to the health of this woman. So a judge there said, this has to be sorted out in some fashion.

Tennessee and Texas, they now have from point of conception bans on all of this. They did not run into this problem, Texas in particular in court, because they said it is for the woman's life or serious impairment of her health, although that's also a challenge for legal analysts, because they say what constitutes serious impairment?

And will some of these doctors find themselves in court because their decision wasn't as serious, and somebody else, some prosecutor later said, we don't think it's so serious?

By the way, Idaho has an exception for rape and incest if it's been reported to law enforcement. Tennessee and Texas now do not have that. And, as you mentioned, North Dakota and Oklahoma coming on board over the weekend with very severe changes up there in terms of their law.

Overall, Bianna, this is where we are. Remember, many of these states are simply adding to some abortion restrictions they already had. But, overall, if you talk about those that are going into the most severe stance here, the most anti-abortion rights stance, that's now about 10.1 million women will be impacted before this weekend is over, one- third of the states out there.

So, again, many of these places already had it, but they're making it tougher for women who would seek abortion, and they're making the penalties on those who might provide abortions stronger, harsher all the way around -- Bianna.

GOLODRYGA: Yes, the consequences of these trigger laws are just so severe.

Tom Foreman, thank you.

Well, growing fears after nearby fires knocked Europe's largest nuclear power plant completely off the power grid today. It's the first time that's happened in this plant's history. What's at stake? We will tell you up next.

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GOLODRYGA: There are growing fears of potential nuclear disaster in Ukraine today, after Europe's largest nuclear power plant was completely knocked off the power grid not once, but twice. That's never happened in the plant's history.

CNN's Sam Kiley is live in Kyiv.

So, Sam, first of all, we should note that this plant is now under Russian control. But what do we know about what's going on?

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is potentially a doomsday scenario, one that has been, according to both the Russians and the Ukrainians, at least partially resolved.

So here's what both sides agree happened. It was the Zaporizhzhia region nuclear power plant, which is the biggest in Europe, has six reactors. Two of them are currently active, if you like. They're supposedly generating electricity.

It was knocked off the Ukrainian grid by a fire. Now, who caused the fire? Both sides blame each other's shelling. But the point is that the power was lost to the power station. That is essential because it powers the cooling systems for the reactors.

Now, there are backup cooling systems in the form of diesel generators. The IAEA, the International Atomic Energy authority, and the Ukrainians have been saying for some weeks that this puts the station at risk because the diesel is not necessarily always available and those generators can't be run for a sustained period.

But the Russians are saying they have reconnected the power station to the grid, so that the cooling system can presumably resume. But the IAEA is now saying that, as far as they are aware, the six reactors are no longer connected to the Ukrainian grid.

Now, that may mean that they are no longer sending electricity into the Ukrainian system. And there had been plans mooted by the Russians to move their generating capacity away from the Ukrainian network into the Russian network.

This is one of the doomsday scenarios, because, if the cooling breaks down at any stage because of a power cut, effectively, the station could melt down. The nuclear power, the nuclear generation will continue, but it will melt down.

Now, at the same time, the head of the nuclear agency told CNN, told me just a couple of days ago that he was worried that trucks stored by the Russians in the turbine hall

there were carrying explosives.

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