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Ukrainian Counteroffensive; Steve Bannon to Surrender to New York Authorities; New Details Emerge on Mar-a-Lago Documents; Barack and Michelle Obama Return to White House. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired September 07, 2022 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:01]

JOHN KING, CNN HOST: Russia's state news agency reports Putin and his Chinese counterpart will meet on the sidelines of a summit in Uzbekistan next week.

This quick programming note: CNN celebrates Serena Williams, exploring the moments that have shaped her. "Serena Williams: On Her Terms" airs Sunday night 8:00 p.m. Eastern right here on CNN.

Thanks for your time today on INSIDE POLITICS. We will see you tomorrow.

Ana Cabrera picks up our coverage right now.

ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Hello. I'm Ana Cabrera in New York. Thanks for being with us.

A long-standing American tradition, one we haven't witnessed in a decade, is back. Moments from now, President Biden will host former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama in the East Room to unveil their official White House portraits.

Let's go live to CNN's Phil Mattingly at the White House.

And, Phil, while we wait for this event to get under way, which is coming, again, in just a few moments, give us a sense of what we can expect.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: You know, you have already seen the former staffers for President Obama filing and a lot of have been milling about the White House grounds over the course of the last several hours, to some degree, a reunion, not just for the staff, but also for the president and the former president.

And, obviously, the president was the former vice president as well, eight years together serving in the White House, obviously, a close relationship, a very deeply personal relationship, one that's had its ups and downs. But there's no question, throughout the roller coaster, that the two have remained friends and have remained in contact since President Biden took office last year.

Now, this will mark the first trip back to the White House for the former first lady Michelle Obama since she left office on January 20 of 2017. It'll be the second for former President Obama.

And, as you noted, Ana, this is a tradition, one that has been on a pause, at least for the last decade, since George W. Bush and Laura Bush had their portraits unveiled by then-President Obama. President Trump decided not to. We don't exactly know why.

But that tradition will be renewed. Both the president and the first lady, former president and first lady, will have their portraits unveiled. All four, the president, the first lady, former President Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, are expected to speak.

Usually, if you track back through history, read through the transcripts of these events, they're pretty funny. They're pretty light. They're pretty jovial. There's also a deep-seated respect for a very exclusive club and someone who actually has knowledge of what it is like to be sitting in that Oval Office, some of the most difficult and significant moments in history.

Whether or not that changes given the deeply personal relationship or, perhaps more importantly, the deeply troubled times that the country often finds itself in that both of these men have discussed, we will have to wait and see.

But, as of now, we know that both portraits will be unveiled. All four are expected to speak. And you can probably expect a little bit of lightheartedness, if nothing else, during these remarks, Ana.

CABRERA: We could all use a smile and a laugh and anything to lighten things up a little.

Thank you so much, Phil Mattingly. We will check back.

Again, this event set to begin later this hour. We will bring it to you live.

Right now, I want to turn to some new reporting about some of the classified documents the FBI seized last month at Mar-a-Lago. According to "The Washington Post," citing people familiar with the search, among the more than 100 classified documents found in the former president's home was a document -- quote -- "describing a foreign government's military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities."

Now, the list of what nation this document could pertain to is a short one. There are only nine that have or are suspected to have nuclear weapons, and they include both allies and adversaries. Now, "The Post" also reports America's own most protected secrets were found. Some of the seized documents detail U.S. operations so closely guarded, only the president and a handful of others would have access.

We're talking programs so secret, some most senior national security officials didn't even know they existed.

I want to bring in CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analysts John Miller, along with former White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush Richard Painter, and white-collar and federal criminal defense attorney Caroline Polisi.

Thank you all for joining us.

John, first, welcome to CNN.

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, thank you.

CABRERA: I want to ask you, because of your intel background, what do you see as the impact of this kind of information, nuclear secrets being kept at Mar-a-Lago?

MILLER: Well, as a former national security official who was deputy assistant director for national intelligence and worked in a place where every level of secret was stored and cared for, it's kind of an otherworld experience to actually be in this conversation.

There's a process for keeping secrets, a physical, mechanical process. Things that are top secret are in a SCIF. Things that are just secret are in a rated safe. Things that are secret that are in a SCIF, which is a secret compartmented information facility, it's a lead-lined room that you need combinations and special clearances to get in, are stored in safes there.

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Information that's kept electronically is stored on a computer that, when you log onto it, you can only reach the holdings in that computer that you are specifically cleared for. And you're blocked from all else.

That's a far cry from a padlock on a room in the basement of 1100 South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach. And that's why...

CABRERA: And at a facility that's not just a private residence, necessarily. This is a place where other people frequent.

MILLER: But a club.

CABRERA: Right.

MILLER: So, I mean, if you take that to its extreme, if you're a foreign power looking to get secrets that would be virtually unobtainable within the intelligence community without recruiting and developing a sleeper cell of moles for 20 years, you could get a job at a resort that gave you access to the basement, where all kinds of things are stored, and then only have to figure out a simple padlock to get to that level of information.

So when you talk about other nations' nuclear capabilities, that shows U.S. intelligence collection, but it also shows gaps.

CABRERA: Right.

MILLER: What do we know? What do -- we don't know? And that's the kind of strategic information that can do tremendous

damage. The other components of this, which is human source collection, this is not a game or a joke.

CABRERA: Yes.

MILLER: I mean, there are human sources that can be identified through those things. And they can and they have in history been killed after detection.

So the idea that we're kind of talking about this in layers of political realms, when the violation of law is so clear, is a little bizarre.

If you took politics out of it, and you said, Joe was a pharmacist, he closed his pharmacy, he took all his OxyContin and other painkillers and brought them home, and people found out about that when they did the inventory, and the DEA came with a warrant and searched his garage and found it all, there wouldn't be an esoteric discussion about, well, why did he have it, and what was he going to do with it?

CABRERA: Right.

MILLER: He would be in possession of illegal drugs. He would probably, in high likelihood, be arrested fairly soon.

But politics is kind of making us overthink what is pretty clear here.

CABRERA: Huh. That's interesting to think about it that way.

And, Richard, you have spent time working inside a White House. How would these kinds of documents even leave the White House?

RICHARD PAINTER, FORMER ASSOCIATE WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: Well, this is shocking.

President Bush in 2005 asked me to give lectures to the entire White House staff on the handling of classified information after we did have a leak of the identity of a CIA agent by a political operative who wanted to retaliate against her husband.

But this is even more dangerous, far more dangerous, very shocking. These are nuclear secrets either of a close ally of the United States, such as France, or Great Britain, or Israel, or some other country, or nuclear secrets of an adversary. And I don't know why Donald Trump had them.

What was he intending to do with them?

CABRERA: Right.

PAINTER: This is a very, very dangerous situation for national security.

And I believe that we have reached the point where he probably -- Donald Trump ought to be taken into custody until we can figure out what he was going to do with these nuclear secrets. Does he have photocopies of them? Our national security is at grave risk because of the reckless conduct, the violations of the Espionage Act by a former president.

Whether he's engaged in espionage, whether he himself is engaged in actual spying, or whether he is simply mishandling classified information, we don't know. But now that we're talking about nuclear secrets and the survival of our country -- and the human race is involved when you talk about nuclear secrets -- I believe we have reached the point where the Department of Justice should take him into custody until we could figure out what is going on here.

Why did he have those documents? Which country's nuclear secrets were they, and what was he going to do with them?

CABRERA: Caroline, I want to get your perspective. What do you see as the legal ramifications, and what should happen right now? Do you agree with Richard?

CAROLINE POLISI, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Well, I certainly think Richard hit the nail on the head with his invocation of a potential violation of the Espionage Act.

Up until this point, Ana, the former president and his lawyers and his allies have been trying to frame this as merely, at worst, a low-level violation of the Presidential Records Act, which, in and of itself, does not have an enforcement mechanism. And they did try to sort of put it in that category.

With each piece of information that is reported out, we see that it's less and less. Perhaps it began through Archives, through an investigation through Archives, which was then referred to DOJ. But it is now getting to the level where it's incredibly serious.

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One of the criminal statutes that was listed on the affidavit submitted to get the search warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, which was uncovered sort of unprecedentedly, was a violation of the Espionage Act. So that, specifically, you need defensive information.

Well, this reporting really ties together -- ties it all up in a nice little bow. What defensive information could they be talking about? Nuclear secrets. So I think it's pretty -- it's all coming together. So

CABRERA: So, John, here's the thing.

Trump not only took these documents to his Mar-a-Lago property, but he wouldn't give them back, not in January, not in June, when he was asked, or even after a subpoena. Why? Why would he want to hold on to these?

MILLER: Well, that is the $64 million question.

But it's interfering with the alibi, which is, first, the early defense is, well, he didn't really know he had them or what they were. Yet, after all of those requests to return the earlier documents, and then they responded to those in detail, you can't kind of say, A, we didn't know they were there, and, B, we have been talking about this for six months.

And, C, in the early affidavit, there's discussions in the investigation about having subpoenaed the videotapes from the basement and from the access area to those documents that show boxes moving in, boxes moving out. So why were they moving? And where were they going? And who was moving them?

Because I'm circling back to the beginning, Ana. There's nobody in that entire building, not Donald Trump, not any of his staff, that are actually still cleared to possess or even see these documents. So...

CABRERA: Again, just a handful of people would have been cleared, right, to even know these documents exist.

MILLER: I mean, one of the ironies here is that the FBI special agents, to be a special agent -- I'm a former assistant director of the FBI -- to work in the building, you need a top secret clearance.

And some of the materials that they were handling was higher than the clearance that the agents handling them had. So it's very serious stuff.

CABRERA: So, Caroline, the timing of this, right, on August 11, "The Post" reported first that the FBI had searched Trump's home to look for nuclear documents. Then it was August 12 that Trump posted: "Nuclear weapons issue is a hoax."

I'm quoting him there. On September 5, just this past Monday, a special master request was approved by Judge Aileen Cannon. And then, last night, we learned that there was nuclear material seized. I wonder, would the judge have already known this, these nuclear details, when she appointed a special master that's delaying the DOJ's investigation?

POLISI: No. No, absolutely not, Ana.

Judge Cannon has not seen the documents and has, in fact, enjoined the DOJ from continuing that investigation. The DNI investigation can proceed. But you're getting to a real catch-22 here, which is that the level of just how classified this information was, how incredibly, incredibly high clearance people have to have to -- in order to even see it, it's going to be -- make the appointment of a special master difficult.

And it's going to make the prosecution of any alleged crime by the DOJ that much more difficult. And they're going to have to really make a decision whether to prosecute for lower-level offenses, just in order to sort of side-skirt this issue, or to go for it all, in which case it's going to be very difficult to handle that level of classified information in a prosecution.

CABRERA: Real quickly, Richard, Bill Barr, Trump's former attorney general, has taken issue with this appointment of the special master or this allowance of a special master, calling the ruling deeply flawed.

Do you think the DOJ will appeal this? And, if so, would they be victorious?

PAINTER: Well, now that we're talking about nuclear secrets, I don't know if we can find a special master who is going to have the security clearance.

The judge is going to need to get the security clearance. This is a very dangerous situation. So I believe the DOJ probably would be successful on appeal. I want to reiterate what I told the Bush White House staff in 2005. If you take classified documents home with you, the FBI is going to show up with a search warrant. They're going to take the documents.

And if those are very sensitive documents, whether it's nuclear secrets or anything else, you are going to be taken into custody. Anybody else who took those documents would be in custody by now. We need to find out what Donald Trump was going to do with those documents. Why did he have them? What's going on here?

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And now that we're hearing about nuclear secrets, this is a much more dangerous situation than we thought it was a few weeks ago.

CABRERA: I really appreciate all of your expertise and the insights that you provided in this conversation.

Thank you so much. John Miller, Richard Painter, and Caroline Polisi.

And now to Steve Bannon. The longtime Trump ally and adviser is expected to turn himself in tomorrow. Sources tell CNN it's related to New York state charges linked to his Build the Wall fund-raiser that brought in more than $25 million.

CNN's Brynn Gingras is joining us with this story.

Brynn, remind us what Bannon is accused of doing here.

BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Ana, he's accused of taking about a million dollars of that $25 million that was raised and diverting it for personal use and telling donors who gave that money, essentially, that it was going to go to the construction of a wall at the Southern border, but he's accused of it -- again, spending it on personal use.

Now, if this all sounds familiar to you, Ana, that's because, back in 2020, he was federally charged for similar conduct, but then-President Trump pardoned him on those charges. And so, obviously, that case never moved forward.

So, sources told my colleague Kara Scannell that that's when the state investigators, the Manhattan district attorney's office opened its own investigation into similar conduct. And keep in mind here, a pardon by the president doesn't apply to a state investigation, and sources also telling her that that's -- also, people close to Bannon did come in for that grand jury seating, providing testimony, giving evidence, and that is where we are today, now with an indictment, that we have learned he will turn himself in on those state charges.

Now, we don't exactly know what those charges are, because the indictment is not unsealed as of yet, but, certainly, we will learn more in court tomorrow. But I will tell you, Bannon has said that these are phony charges and in a statement continued saying "nothing more than a partisan political weaponization of the criminal justice system."

So of course, as you said, he will turn himself into state court tomorrow, and we will see what those charges are.

CABRERA: Brynn Gingras, thank you. And we will be continuing to cover that story as it develops.

OK, retaking key ground, but warning of a tough road ahead. Ukraine's top general speaking out, as his fighters continue a bold counteroffensive against the Russians. Why he says they can win the war, but it will take new weapons and a lot more time.

Plus, a White House tradition returns just moments from now. Stay with us, as President Biden hosts the Obamas for the unveiling of their official White House portraits.

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CABRERA: New today, Ukraine's chief nuclear inspector says his government may shut down the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant due to safety fears.

Kyiv and Moscow blame each other for shelling on and around the Russian health complex. Meanwhile, Ukraine says its counteroffensive in the south is making gains. And CNN has learned the U.S. is hammering out more plans to support Ukraine's military.

CNN's Barbara Starr joins us at the Pentagon. And our Sam Kiley is in Odessa.

Sam, let me start with you.

Tell us more about Ukraine's recent advances in the south.

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, just about a week-old, this counteroffensive, which had been much trumpeted and set up with what's called shaping operations, probing attacks, attacks against the logistics bases of the Russians, the bombardment of that important river connecting Kherson, the regional capital, which is their ultimate target, which Jim Sciutto's reporting shows that the Ukrainians want to try and capture before December. That was all shaped up, and they are managing to make incremental gains, more small villages here and there, as they press their offensive. But we have been talking to soldiers on the front line, and they're saying it's going to be a meter-by-meter operation. It's very, very intensive fighting, where the Ukrainians have the edge in terms of the quality and precision of their weapons, but not in terms of the volume of weapons, the amount of artillery or the amount of soldiers they can throw into the fight.

And elsewhere in the country, in the east, there are signs that the Ukrainians are also getting on the front foot there, possibly managing to push forward to try to relieve some of the villages close to Kharkiv. But this is all coming at a time when the Russians are also stepping up their own logistical resupply systems, with now, reportedly, the efforts buying large amounts of ammunition from North Korea.

CABRERA: And, Barbara, what is the time frame that the Pentagon is looking at in terms of their long-term support for Ukraine?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Ana, I know they're looking out about five years from now, three to five years, if you will.

What do you want Ukraine military to look like, what kinds of capabilities do the Ukrainians want to have, what kind of military strategy, so they can become fully capable once the current war is over of being able to defend themselves against future aggression.

So, this analysis, if you will, is being spearheaded by General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, obviously talking to the Ukrainians. They obviously have their own ideas about what they think they need. But it begins to shape away ahead for future multiyear arms sales, for future U.S. military training of Ukraine's forces, for other nations to also continue to be involved in arms sales and arms transfers to Ukrainians.

And, even today, we are seeing steps forward, both General Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin today on their way to Germany for a meeting tomorrow with Ukrainian military leaders and about 40 other countries in this contact group they have developed, where they meet every several weeks, and they talk about the way ahead. They talk about what weapons are needed for Ukraine in the near term.

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We are expecting to see another announcement from Austin about the next round of arms transfers to Ukraine, even now hoping to further facilitate that progress in the south that Sam is watching so carefully.

CABRERA: Barbara Starr and Sam Kiley, thank you both.

Ahead, we are heading to the White House for the return of a Washington tradition. Former President Obama and first lady Michelle are back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the unveiling of their official White House portraits.

Stay with us. You're watching CNN. You're in the NEWSROOM.

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