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Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Former President Trump; Biden On Midterms: Going To See Shift Back To Dems In Final Days. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired October 21, 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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VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: Top of the hour now on CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Victor Blackwell.

ERICA HILL, CNN HOST: And I'm Erica Hill. The January 6 Committee has now subpoenaed former President Trump over his role in the violent attack on the Capitol. He now has until November 4th to turn over slew of documents requested by the January 6 Committee.

And while the subpoena was expected, it is the Committee's most aggressive step yet could result in an epic legal battle, which frankly, is also anticipated. The panel is asking for phone calls, text, videos from the former president relating to the attack on the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

BLACKWELL: It's also demanding Trump testify under oath on November 14th. Now, in a letter accompanying the subpoena, the panel said this: "As demonstrated in our hearings, we have assembled overwhelming evidence, including from dozens of your former appointees and staff, that you personally orchestrated and oversaw a multipart effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and to obstruct the peaceful transition of power."

CNN Senior Crime & Justice Reporter, Katelyn Polantz, joins us now. Katelyn, this January 6 Committee making it clear that they see Trump as the central figure of this effort.

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Exactly, Victor. The center of everything that is what this cover letter and the subpoena makes clear as they're seeking documents and testimony from Donald Trump. And they're putting this subpoena against the backdrop of everything that the House Select Committee has found so far in their sprawling investigation, hundreds of witness interviews, thousands of documents collected, and they do believe, based on all of the evidence that they have collected the testimony that they have taken, that Donald Trump was at the center of a multi-part effort that they explained was pressuring different parts of the government, members of Congress, the court system also riling up Trump supporters asking for help from Justice Department officials, all of it comes together around Trump.

And this committee does believe that there are only answers that Donald Trump can provide to them, information that only Trump may be willing to give. The other thing that they're doing with the subpoena is they're setting this against the backdrop of history. They're testing Trump, as a former president, that office holder really do what people in the past have also done.

They say former presidents go whole way back to John Quincy Adams up to Gerald Ford have sat for testimony with committees. They also mentioned that Abraham Lincoln as a sitting president testified to Congress and so they really are testing Trump here, putting it on the line and seeing what he does to respond in just a few weeks.

HILL: We know it hasn't been too long since this letter was released, which means we haven't had a ton of time to look it over. The president earlier this week saying he'd love to testify. Katelyn, have we heard yet from his legal team in response to the subpoena?

POLANTZ: Well, we do have sources that say that Trump's team is discussing how to respond. We know he has a couple of lawyers designated to be handling this particular legal issue that's facing him right now out of a whole lot of lawyers that he has around him dealing with lots of different things. We are going to have to wait and see exactly what happens over these coming weeks. He has a couple of options.

He could fight this in court. He could sue. He could try to claim executive privilege, presidential privilege, confidentiality around himself and with a lot of conversations with his advisers and lawyers. He also, of course, could just run out the clock. There is an election coming up, the Congress will expire or he always has the option to testify. At the same time, the House Select Committee has some options of their own and that's including whether or not they want to look to the court system in the way that they did with Steve Bannon, with Peter Navarro and with some others and potentially asked the Justice Department to prosecute Donald Trump, if he refuses to comply, but we'll have to see how that plays out.

BLACKWELL: Yes. We'll talk about Steve Bannon in just a moment. Katelyn, standby for us. We want to expand the conversation now.

HILL: We want to bring in another case involving the former president, so we're learning more about some of the documents that the FBI recovered from Donald Trump's Mar-A-Lago estate in early August. Some of those documents include highly sensitive intelligence which we had known. Now the Washington Post is reporting specifically that some of those documents involved information with Iran, China.

Sources telling the paper at least one document was about information about Iran's missile program. Just last hour, we spoke with Devlin Barrett, who broke the story.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DEVLIN BARRETT, JUSTICE REPORTER THE WASHINGTON POST: Some of these documents, we're told, describe intelligence gathering activities targeting China.

[15:05:00] And obviously China is a - is one of the major U.S. adversaries in the world and that relationship is very tense particularly on the intelligence front. And if you call back a couple of years, you'll remember that we recent - our country recently lost a lot of intelligence assets in the China space and so obviously anything that could cause further damage to our intelligence gathering capability over there is very concerning.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: All right. Katelyn is still with us. Elie Honig, CNN Senior Legal Analyst and former federal prosecutor joins the conversation as well as Joshua Skule, served as Executive Assistant Director for intelligence at the FBI. He is also the President of Bow Wave. Good to have both of you.

Elie, let me start with you. The next steps here as we look to what happens, we've been anticipating this subpoena for some time now and the Trump team as Caitlin says, they're now deciding how to move forward.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, Victor. So first, Donald Trump has to make a decision. Does he want to comply with this? Does he want to turn over documents? Does he want to subject himself to a deposition to questioning under deposition by the Committee? That's what the Committee requests in the subpoena? Does he want to try to negotiate some sort of middle ground with the Committee? Or third, does he just want to defy the Committee outright?

If he defies the Committee and it seems like he might, given his prior statements, then the Committee is going to have two options here. One is they can go to a court, into a federal court and seek an order from a judge forcing Donald Trump to testify. The problem, though, as Katelyn said, is that takes many, many months. That's more time than the Committee has.

The second option that the Committee will have is if Donald Trump defies the subpoena is to hold him in contempt and then send the case over to DOJ for potential prosecution like we've seen with Steve Bannon. We don't know whether DOJ would charge that case. DOJ has received four referrals so far from the Committee. They've only charged two of them, Bannon and Peter Navarro, they declined to charge the other two.

So those are the two legal avenues available to the Committee if Donald Trump defies the subpoena.

HILL: As we're looking at this, Josh, there's a very detailed list of everything that the Committee is asking for in terms of documentation. At the end, it basically says and anything else we forgot is sort of the way I read one of those questions at the end. When you look at that list, what does it say to you in terms of what this committee already knows?

JOSHUA SKULE, FORMER FBI EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR INTELLIGENCE: Obviously, the Committee knows quite a bit, right, and if they're smart, they're trying to put a catch all in there on anything that they missed. My guess is that they are putting together a strategy. Obviously, what the Washington Post reported is very concerning. This is, frankly, not about politics, it's about national security.

BLACKWELL: Elie, let me stay with you on this. The November 4th deadline for documents, November 14th for Testimony, even after the election, you've got Democratic control of a lame duck House. If they send over a criminal referral, do you think this AG moves forward with consequences for a president who doesn't respond to this subpoena?

HONIG: That's a great question, Victor. And the calendar doesn't matter quite as much here if they go this route. If the Committee votes to hold Donald Trump in contempt, as long as they get that vote done before January 3rd 2023, when the next Congress takes over, then that referral goes over to DOJ and it will be in Merrick Garland's House to make a decision.

Garland so far, he's two for four. He's received four referrals. He's charged two of them criminally. He's charged Steve Bannon, who of course was sentenced earlier today. And Peter Navarro who goes to trial next month, but he has chosen not to charge Mark Meadows. He's chosen not to charge Dan Scavino.

I think part of the calculation of DOJ, if you ask why these two, but not those two, is the strength of any potential executive privilege argument. And also, I think it seems Garland was looking at, did these people make some good faith effort to negotiate to engage or did they just sort of flagrantly defy the subpoenas.

So Donald Trump's legal team may be thinking about those factors, do we want to at least make a show of trying to negotiate because that could make it less likely that DOJ chooses to charge?

HILL: Katelyn, it's interesting, too, in reading through this how much - Elie referred to some of these as sort of a flex move on the part of the Committee. There's definitely that aspect of it. There's also and you can see in reading through this letter, Katelyn, that the Committee is really trying to blunt some of the arguments that could be coming their way in terms of precedent, in terms of privilege, in terms of why and how they got to this point, the fact that it is so detailed. Was there always a sense in Washington that they were going to put it all out there like this?

POLANTZ: Well, we've seen them put it all out there in all of these hearings over the summer and even just recently.

[15:10:00]

And so the Committee has really put a lot of the information they've gathered. They're condensing it now into this. They're really putting the focus back on Donald Trump here.

But one of the things that's so interesting in watching these House subpoenas play out and what their next move might be, which we just don't know yet, is that the Committee has really struggled, as Elie was saying, with enforcement. And even with the Steve Bannon case, we saw Steve Bannon get sentenced to jail time today, four months in jail, and yet he still has an opportunity to appeal, because the judge is acknowledging that there are pieces of the law around Congress' powers that he is going to want to challenge and that is going to go up to the appeals court here, potentially even to the Supreme Court, so all of that may need to be worked out.

There's just a lot of questions legally around how powerful the House subpoena can be, even if they make a very strong case for why Donald Trump should sit for testimony and turn over documents.

BLACKWELL: Josh, let's shift to the Washington Post reporting about some details about what was seized from the Mar-A-Lago estate on August 8th when federal agents search that property. At least one of the documents was related to Iranian missile programs, the others - some documents focused on China as well. Your reaction to the sensitivity of the documents seized?

SKULE: Well, Victor, I think that these documents are extremely sensitive. And China is the most enduring threat to the United States as laid out in the national defense strategy. Iran is not - is a close third in that regard. They are clearly hugely sensitive documents, which go to sources and methods, not just for the United States, but also for our allies.

HILL: When we look at this, too, Elie, we heard from the DOJ recently, there's some concern that there are still documents at Mar-A-Lago. So with this new reporting from the Post that just really adds to the seriousness of what we've learned here, why does it seem that this is all sort of being handled with kid gloves? If there's concern, there are still documents, they're highly sensitive, why would they not go in and get them at this point?

HONIG: It's a great question, Erica. And I would echo it.

Look, DOJ and the archives have been incredibly patient and solicitous, arguably too much so in getting these documents back from Donald Trump and his team. They've allowed this to play out over well more than a year. They tried the nice route, they negotiated, they got some of the documents back, not all of them. They tried to subpoena like we just saw. This is a grand jury subpoena saying give us everything. Again, they got some more documents back, but not all. They did the search in August and they got what they believed was all the documents, they could have gotten at Mar-A-Lago.

But if they believe there are other documents out there and if this reporting is correct that some of the documents they've already recovered go to the most classified information about Iran and China, then it's a great question. What are they waiting for? Why are they playing nice? You need to go get those documents for the reason that Josh just laid out.

HILL: Elie, the Trump team is reportedly offering this supervised search. I don't know what that is. I know what a request is, I know a subpoena, I know a search warrant, but the idea that the attorneys will say, can't go to that room, you can't open that door, is there any scenario in which they would agree to a supervised search?

HONIG: It's an interesting creative hybrid, I guess. There is such thing as what we call a consent search where a party says, yes, you can search my car. Yes, you can search my home. Here I'm not confident that that would play out well. And let's remember, DOJ ultimately, really is in the advantageous position here.

DOJ is the ones who have the ability to go back to a federal judge, say, we need another search warrant. And if they can make that showing to a federal judge, then they don't have to be politely escorted around. They don't have to politely be told you can look here, but you can't look there.

So DOJ really holds the power here. If I was back at DOJ and I was given this offer, we'll walk you around Mar-A-Lago and show you where you can look, I wouldn't be all that interested in it. I don't think it's likely to be fruitful or productive.

HILL: Elie, Katelyn, Josh, good to have all of you with us this afternoon. Thank you.

BLACKWELL: President Biden is keeping his focus on economic issues. He's speaking on the student loan forgiveness rollout back in his home state of Delaware. He also has a new midterm prediction. That's next.

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[15:18:48]

HILL: Just moments from now, President Biden expected to tout his student debt cancellation policy. He's doing that this afternoon at Delaware State University. The White House said in a beta test last weekend, 8 million people signed up to apply for some relief from their student loans.

BLACKWELL: The website went live officially this week. CNN's Phil Mattingly is at the White House. So the President is making this speech focused on younger voters.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's exactly right. And to be clear, just a couple of weeks ago it wasn't necessarily an obvious thing that the President would be out talking about this issue, the kind of arduous policy process that led to the President's decision to cancel up to $10,000 in student loans for borrowers making less than $125,000 - $20,000 for those that have received Pell Grants was not an easy process and one that has some detractors even within their own party, certainly from Republicans who oppose the issue outright.

What's changed is a couple of things. One, as you guys noted, I think this is a very critical point. The website is up, the website is working millions of borrowers have already utilized that process. They've also had a couple of court cases based on Republican lawsuits go their way in the last several days, but the past politics is certainly important here.

[15:20:01]

It was a campaign pledge by the President, that's why he ended up moving forward with it. But the reality is, young voters, particularly young black voters were critical to the President's coalition in 2020. A lot of officials told me that they have seen a very real resonance of this issue of the President's action with those groups in particular - groups will be critical in the votes just a few weeks from now, in the midterm elections.

The President will be speaking at Delaware State, that's a historically black university, making a very clear pitch on an issue that maybe a month ago wasn't a big plan to talk about on a regular basis. Now, moving front and center, something that underscores, one, the fact a lot of officials feel like this is an important and relevant issue, but, two, that they feel like it can have a very real effect on those midterm elections, guys.

HILL: Meantime, the President actually did bring it up a little bit earlier, when he spoke about the deficit. He also had a new prediction for the midterms, Phil.

MATTINGLY: Yes, it was interesting, the President's tone this morning, I'm sure you guys were watching, was different. It was sharper, it was certainly a more political attack message to some degree when it comes to the contrast between his party and Republicans than we've seen before. But as you noted, there was also a bit of a prediction about what might happen in the next couple of weeks, take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The polls have been all over the place. I think that we're going to see one more shift back to our side in the closing days.

And let me tell you why I think that. We're starting to see some of the good news on the economy.

It's mega MAGA trickle-down. Mega MAGA trickle-down - the kind of policies that have failed the country before and will fail it again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: That last sentence or two, definitely in the sharper contrast kind of box, if you will. The first though, look, predictions are always a bit of a dangerous game. We've seen that over and over again in the last couple of election cycles. But I think what the President seems to be implicitly referring to there is that there has been a very clear drop in gas prices over the course of the last couple of weeks.

White House officials have said repeatedly the correlation between the President's approval, the party's approval and the potential for holding on to majorities in the Senate, and even the House is very much tied to gas prices. They were down for almost a hundred days. They started to pop back up again for about a month. Over the course of the last several weeks, last week, in particular, they've started to drop again, the sense that that might continue leading right into the midterm elections has created at least some sense of positivity here in the White House and it appears that maybe what the President was basing that prediction on earlier today, guys.

BLACKWELL: Eighteen days, I know you're counting. Phil Mattingly at the White House. Thank you, Phil.

HILL: You know who else is counting down? CNN Political Commentator, S.E. Cupp.

BLACKWELL: Uh-huh.

HILL: I'm sure you've got a calendar you're just marking with Xs, S.E.

S.E. CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Right.

HILL: So let's talk about that prediction and I also thought was interesting, as Phil pointed out there, this sharper more political tone from President Biden. But he says, look, these voters are going to swing to the Democratic side in the next 18 days, because of this good news you're starting to see on the economy. I wonder too, is that not also a message to voters saying, hey, don't sit back and not vote because you're hearing we're not going to win, I'm telling you we can, I need you.

CUPP: Well, that would - that could work that way, but I think it could also work the other way if the goal is turnout and you're saying we're going to be fine. Does that create the urgency to run out and vote? I'm not sure. And it was a bit of a mixed message from Biden.

That sharper political tone, I think, was trying to communicate an urgency over what's at stake here. But again, telling people you think there's going to be great economic news coming and so Democrats are going to come out in higher numbers than we're seeing in polls. I don't know if that's a message of urgency or not, I want to see.

BLACKWELL: S.E., I'm wondering what do we expect him to say? What's the alternative? Eighteen days, it's a wrap, we're not going to win this.

HILL: It's been fun.

BLACKWELL: Don't throw your Amazon boxes, you're going to need them? I mean, this is probably what any president would say.

CUPP: No, I would have said it is neck and neck. It's a drunk ball. It's anyone's game. And that, I think, creates the urgency that my vote, my one vote ...

BLACKWELL: Yes.

CUPP: ... could actually make a difference. I think that's - that the urgent tone. And politicians do this all the time and Donald Trump actually did it a lot during the midterm elections he oversaw. He said, we're going to be fine and Republicans were really frustrated, Republicans in leadership because they know that the name of the game is turnout, urgency, we don't think it's going to be fine. We need your vote.

HILL: It'd be interesting to see, I mean, we are seeing big numbers in certain areas for early voting, what that tells us about how they're voting, not a lot, it just tells us that people are voting, right, so it'd be interesting to see how that plays out. I'm curious with the - with this subpoena and the letter accompanying the subpoena that were released today, for the former president, clock starts now.

[15:25:05]

One would imagine that this is easy for Republicans to pick it up, take it, run with it, say, hey, this is why you need us in power come 2023 because we have to stop this. How much do you think that will be a focus?

CUPP: I think it is. It cuts both ways. I think a lot of voters who are not die hard MAGA Republicans are just sick of this. They're sick of investigations and the ugliness of the allegations that keep coming out of Trump world. And so I think for those voters, which will include independents and moderates, they want to be done with that and that means being done with Trump and in some cases being done with Republicans.

But certainly for MAGA world, they want to keep these stories alive, they get to run on them and they get to play victim of the 'deep state' that is out to get Trump, the deep state that Trump invented for moments like this.

BLACKWELL: Yes. I planned a different conversation for us, S.E., before the subpoena dropped and other things developed during the day, but there's one question I held, the Arizona governor's race, Katie Hobbs, Kari Lake, I know you're no huge fan of Kari Lake, I want to play something she said here and then get your reaction to it and then another question.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KARI LAKE, (R) ARIZONA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: If MLK, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, if JFK were alive today, if our founding fathers were alive today, they would be America First Republicans.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: I mean, I guess I don't need to ask for your reaction because you're laughing through it. What do you think?

CUPP: You can say anything and not back it up. You can claim these icons of the left as, as the new leaders of the far-right, I guess just because, but - I don't even want to waste time trying to dissect how dumb that is. It's about as dumb as the idea in MAGA world. But JFK Jr. is coming back from the dead to run with Donald Trump in 2020.

HILL: Oh, I forgot about that one.

BLACKWELL: Yes.

HILL: That's true.

CUPP: Yes.

BLACKWELL: S.E. Cupp, always good to have you on for your perspective. Thank you.

CUPP: Thank you.

HILL: Across the country, there is a surge in pediatric RSV cases. What's the impact? Hospitals now are running out of beds. One even considering calling the National Guard.

HILL: And in the U.K., new details in the race to replace Liz Truss. We are live from 10 Downing Street next.

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