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Simultaneous Special Counsel Investigations Into Biden, Trump; Treasury Secretary Warns U.S. Could Default On Debt In June; Ukraine Refutes Russia's Claim Of Capturing Town Of Soledar; Rain Expected To Put 15 Million Under Flood Watches In California. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired January 13, 2023 - 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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ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: It's the top of the hour on CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Alisyn Camerota.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: I'm Victor Blackwell.

Two presidents accused of mishandling classified documents, two special counsel investigations and now new developments to report on both. There were no new answers though at today's White House briefing about why the Biden team delayed for months to tell you the classified documents were found.

CAMEROTA: But we are learning that the documents from Biden's time as vice president included briefing memos about foreign leaders. In terms of the special counsel probe of former President Trump, the Justice Department is questioning if he still has any of the classified files on his properties. You'll recall the FBI retrieved more than 300 from Trump's possession after he resisted requests to return those.

So to get the latest on both situations, we are joined by CNN Chief White House Correspondent Phil Mattingly and CNN Senior Crime and Justice Reporter, Katelyn Polantz.

Phil, did we learn any more from the White House Press Secretary today about the classified docs found at Biden's home and office?

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Alisyn, we learned that if you have any questions about that you should refer them to the White House Counsel's Office and the Justice Department or the special counsel at this point in time and I said somewhat in jest.

But I think that's the reality right now of this moment that the White House - from the podium - with Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary has made a very clear decision that so long as this investigation is ongoing, and obviously we are in the first full day of the special counsel investigation, there's not much more - if anything - they are going to say about the process that is currently underway. And to some degree, it aligns with a position that they had had over

the course of the week before the special counsel was important appointed as the President's private attorneys were continuing their search for any additional documents. And as a Justice Department review being run by the Attorney General in Chicago was playing out.

I think the reality is there are still significant number of questions about how the documents landed where they were, what the actual documents entailed beyond the information that we've actually reported. But this is a very different moment for this White House right now and I think their posture kind of underscores that point and that is a special counsel.

And what the special counsel brings to the table in terms of its investigative power, in terms of its investigative authority, puts them in a position where they are not going to discuss something that's currently underway and they're going to be very limited in what they talk about as they enter a moment where they have to set up for a White House or for a special counsel, and what that means for the administration going forward, guys.

BLACKWELL: So Katelyn, you have new reporting on the Trump documents investigation, federal investigators - there's - they want to speak with two specific people, who are they and why?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, Victor and Alisyn, we don't know their names at this point in time, that's closely held secret. But the Justice Department wants to interview and speak to two people that were hired by Donald Trump's legal team to go and scour for properties of his New Jersey, in Trump Tower in New York and two places in Florida to see if they could find any additional classified documents.

So you'll remember last year, the Trump team sent back several boxes of documents a year ago that had classified filings in them. The Justice Department got an envelope from them later. There was that search in August, where they found more than a hundred. And then these two people were hired by the Trump team in November to go and look one more time to try and satisfy the Justice Department. And they found two additional classified documents that were turned over.

This is all part of an ongoing criminal investigation. Something that distinguishes it from the Biden situation is that it's not just a criminal investigation with a special counsel. It also is an obstruction of justice situation where federal investigators really want to make sure that they have all of the national security secrets back, all of the records that they want to have in their possession no longer on secured with the former president.

And so this latest step, Caitlin Collins and I confirmed, is that they do want to continue the investigation and do some more interviews as looks like that is a possibility going forward.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Thank you for the new information, Phil Mattingly, Katelyn Polantz. BLACKWELL: Peter Strzok is former FBI Deputy Assistant Director who

wrote Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump and conservative S.E. Cupp is a CNN Political Commentator. Welcome to you both.

Peter, let me start with you.

[15:05:00]

We heard from Karine Jean-Pierre today, although they were new - no new answers about the - their perspective on the investigation, she says that the President will cooperate with the investigation. She would not say whether that would include sitting for an interview with the special counsels' team. Can the team get to the answer of the President's knowledge and intent without that interview?

PETER STRZOK, FORMER FBI DEPUTY ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: No, I don't think so. I mean, look, there's a very logical investigative path, it's pretty straightforward that the FBI and DOJ have done time and again, that's to - in this case - figure out what the totality of classified information is, make sure you have it all back and then set aside - figuring out what the damage may or may not have occurred in terms of an intelligence context.

And then there's the pretty straightforward similar investigative path of how did it get there, who placed it there, what instructions were they giving, what did they do, did they go through it, did they know it was in there, who had access to it. But at the end of the day, you need to sit down with the person who ultimately had ownership of this. In this case, President Biden, and ask them some pretty straightforward questions: What did you know? Did you have any supervisory responsibility over the packing up of this material? Who had access to this, whether it was at the office, whether it was at your residence in Delaware.

There are very standard things that he needs to be asked and I really expect that at the end of the day, that he will be asked and that he will sit down and be interviewed by probably a mixture of both agents and attorneys from the Department of Justice.

CAMEROTA: S.E., it's been remarkable to watch how fortunes have turned on a dime here. The Democrats were feeling quite good after the midterms. They were feeling like the party with the high moral ground after the chaos on the House floor and now suddenly, this has taken the wind out of their sails, of course. Do you think this changes anything in the big picture? It changes anything about President Biden's run for 2024 or his announcement of it or chances or anything?

S.E. CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, listen, for all the folks that like to complain, myself included, that the Republican House is made up of a lot of conspiracy theorists and kind of quacks, QAnon folks, et cetera. This is not a conspiracy theory. Joe Biden had classified documents in places he should not have, I'm not comfortable leaping to assumptions that was by any kind of duplicity. But they certainly shouldn't have been there and I think we should all take that pretty seriously. It sounds like Joe Biden and his team and the White House are and they

are complying from everything that we have learned. But we don't have to paint equivalencies between what was going on with Trump's classified documents and Joe Biden's classified documents, but it's not good and it does give Republicans ammo and talking points, real ones this time, not made up ones or trumped up charges that didn't exist. This is real and so they'll have something to talk about.

BLACKWELL: Peter, listen to this exchange between Karine Jean- Pierre, White House Press Secretary and our Chief White House Correspondent, Phil Mattingly. And this is over why the White House didn't disclose, what they knew about all the documents that had been discovered, when a news outlet came to them on Monday to ask about this story.

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MATTINGLY: You're now saying that you didn't talk about the second set of documents discovered almost a month prior because the review was underway. I think - I don't understand. It doesn't make any sense.

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: No, I think it ...

MATTINGLY: The review is underway the entire time, the only difference was that reporters had information on the first set of documents, and therefore you chose to exclude the second set of documents until reporters got information on the second set of the documents.

JEAN-PIERRE: Well, let me unconfuse you for a second, Phil. Look, we're trying to do this by the book. And I said yesterday this was under review by the Department of Justice.

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BLACKWELL: So she says they're doing it by the book, just to clear this up. Is there anything, any page of said book? Any rule, any guidance that says they couldn't have acknowledged that there were more documents that first time when they got a question about the documents that were discovered before the election?

STRZOK: Look, it's hard to say. I mean, there are situations where in an investigation, you interview somebody, and because there are others involved, you don't want them alerted to what is going on and have them - give them the ability to prepare statement or get rid of evidence or things like that.

Having said that, there is also some nothing to prevent somebody from going out and announcing what is going on. We saw that during the search at Mar-A-Lago that the FBI conducted.

BLACKWELL: Sure.

STRZOK: The agents went to great lengths to try and protect the fact that there were FBI agents and it was only Trump's announcement that it occurred that got that out there. So I think at the end of the day, the decision of whether or not to say something is largely on the person who is the subject of that investigative activity. We don't know in this case whether or not the FBI asked the Biden administration not to comment.

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I think frankly it would be a little unusual for them to do so. But I can also envision scenarios where they would say, hey, look, we want to get to the bottom of this in a quiet way, the better we can do that, the quicker we can do that, the better off we all are. But at the end of the day, again, I think this is a decision ultimately, that rests with the White House and will at some point, I anticipate, find out whether in fact during that initial interaction between those around Biden and the Department of Justice and the FBI whether or not any such requests were made.

CAMEROTA: Go ahead, S.E.

CUPP: Well, I mean, one of the very serious and I think correct criticisms of the past administration was there was an opacity and a lack of transparency around little things, big things. They stopped telling people who was visiting the White House, they stopped holding press briefings.

So if I were Biden and his administration, I would opt for radical transparency. And offering up the fact that they had the documents to begin with I think is a step in the right direction. But I don't think withholding anything is a good idea if they want to draw a stark comparison - a stark contrast between the last administration and his.

BLACKWELL: S.E. Cupp, Peter Strzok, appreciate you. Thank you.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the U.S. will reach the debt ceiling as soon as next Thursday and that extraordinary measures must be taken to avert defaulting.

CAMEROTA: CNN Capitol Hill Reporter, Melanie Zanona and CNN Economics and Political Commentator, Catherine Rampell join us now.

Melanie, Janet Yellen wrote this in a letter to Speaker McCarthy. This is shaping up - I would imagine - to be one of the first major battles in Congress and it's happening sooner than I think we thought.

MELANIE ZANONA, CNN CAPITOL HILL REPORTER: Yes. The clock is officially ticking. Listen, we knew that Congress is going to have to deal with this issue at some point this year. But now we have actual dates and it is coming a little sooner than we thought.

Janet Yellen said that the nation's borrowing limit is going to be reached by later this month and that the agency is going to run out of extraordinary measures to prevent a default by early June. So this is going to be a massive fiscal fight for Congress in the early year in the early months of their new majority here.

And speaker Kevin McCarthy in his bid to become speaker has promised to tie the debt ceiling to spending cuts, which potentially means cuts or reforms to Social Security or Medicare, which is a hard red line for Democrats. The Democratic leaders in both the Senate and the House today put out a new statement calling for quick action and Chuck Schumer is reiterating his calls to pass a clean debt ceiling on a bipartisan matter.

Take a listen to what he said on CNN this morning.

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SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): It's always has been done in a bipartisan way. Three times when Donald Trump was president, twice when the Republicans had the House and Senate we cooperated with the Republicans and raised it because after all, these are debts we've already incurred, you're just paying the bill.

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ZANONA: Now, Speaker Kevin McCarthy did request a meeting with President Joe Biden where they can sit down and begin to discuss this issue and others, but it is really unclear how this is going to resolve itself because the politics are very complicated for Kevin McCarthy. Democrats are drawing a headline so it is going to be a fiscal showdown this year guys.

BLACKWELL: reaching the debt limit sooner than expected, coming next Thursday, really highlights just how treacherous these times are and this - the tense negotiations between the parties, the point of default is a moving target as well is it not, Catherine, if this date moved?

CATHERINE RAMPELL, CNN ECONOMICS COMMENTATOR: Yes. So we still don't know for sure exactly when the so called X date will happen. That's when Treasury runs out of its so called extraordinary measures. It's basically like some fancy accounting gimmicks, they're moving money around when it runs out of options to continue paying its bills.

Secretary Yellen indicated it might be around June. That is also earlier than had been forecast last year for a few different reasons, including that interest rates are higher, of course, because inflation has persisted for a while longer. And when interest rates are higher, that means the amount that the government has to pay for its debt goes up.

You've also had the student debt, pause, repayment pause extended, that costs money. And if, of course, we have a recession this year, that would reduce tax revenues, which could move the date even earlier. So this time bomb is ticking. The best time to have raised the debt ceiling was yesterday. The next best time is today. Absolutely we need to get this done.

CAMEROTA: And Catherine, just remind us that we keep hearing that this is the money on the credit card that we've already run up. Why is it so important? What is the debt ceiling?

RAMPELL: So basically, this has to do with making good on commitments that Congresses past have already made, spending that they've already appropriated and tax decisions that they have made in the past. It's like if you go to a restaurant and rack have a big bill, if you dine and dash, nobody would say that was fiscally responsible.

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They'd say you have to pay off your bill. That's what this is about. The consequences of not doing that are pretty dire. In the near term, of course, if we are unable to make good on all of our debts, that means things like military service member salaries may not get paid, social security checks may not go out, that sort of thing. It would violate the Constitution, which says that the - that the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned.

And most importantly, it could set off a global financial crisis. Because right now, U.S. debt is considered the safest of safe assets. It is virtually risk-free. Every other investment on Earth, every other asset is benchmarked against our lack of risk essentially.

So if we prove ourselves to be unreliable and risky borrowers that sets off this sort of chain reaction in other financial markets and you could see shockwaves of panic throughout the world. I hope we don't get to that point to be clear, but it would be devastating, particularly if we're already worried about a global recession this year.

CAMEROTA: Thank you for spelling all of that out, Melanie Zanona, Catherine Rampell.

BLACKWELL: After months of setbacks in Ukraine, Russia claims it has taken the eastern town of Soledar in what would be a significant win for the Kremlin. Ukraine, however, says that's not true.

CAMEROTA: And storm-battered California is bracing for more rain. We're live in San Francisco, next.

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CAMEROTA: Ukraine is denying Moscow's claim that Russian forces have taken the town of Soledar in the eastern part of the country. Ukraine claims it's holding the line there amid fierce fighting and as troops run out of both food and water. A Ukrainian soldier tells CNN there are still troops on the edge of that small town.

BLACKWELL: Russia capturing Soledar would be a symbolic if not strategic victory for the Kremlin after months of setbacks on the battlefield. Now as this war grinds closer to the one year mark, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now publicly chastising a trade minister over critical delays.

CAMEROTA: In a televised meeting, Putin berated the top minister for acting too slowly in completing orders for military and civilian aircraft. CNN's Scott McLean is in Kyiv. So Scott, is that public scolding unusual? SCOTT MCLEAN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. So this was

pretty interesting. I think what we'll be unusual for a lot of people to see is this was essentially a public cabinet meeting. A video conference, which you don't often see. Surely the big decisions are made in private. And so this one, this meeting was definitely for public consumption.

But these meetings happen fairly regularly. There's a chance for ministers in charge of the economy, health, railways, et cetera, to give their reports to President Putin directly and in public. And so in this case, you had the Minister of Industry and Trade, talking as you said about completing orders for military and civilian aircraft. And it became very apparent very quickly that President Putin wasn't happy. Listen.

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VLADIMIR PUTIN, PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA (through interpreter): Why are you fooling around?

DENNIS MANTUROV, RUSSIA MINISTER OF INDUSTRY AND TRADE (through interpreter): It will be ready during this quarter based on the funds available under the budget.

PUTIN (through interpreter): I want all of this to be done within a month. What quarter are you talking about? Do you not understand the circumstances we are in? Please complete this work within a month, agreed?

MANTUROV (through interpreter): We will try to do our best.

PUTIN (through interpreter): No. Do not try to do your best, please get it done in a month, no later.

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MCLEAN: So at least in public, President Putin puts on the face of a guy who is very calm, cool and collected. And so you don't see this kind of outburst all that often. But it does happen. You may remember, just two days before the full scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin had a very awkward, very uncomfortable exchange with his chief spy who didn't really know what to say. He was kind of fumbling and bumbling trying to figure out what the right answer was with respect to Russia's approach to the Donbas region.

Surely a lot of people will watch this video and think that President Putin after almost a year of war is unraveling or that he's realizing his country's limitations. But it's important to keep in mind that the Kremlin very carefully curates and controls Putin's image. So if they didn't want this to be out there, it wouldn't be out there. That's important to keep in mind. So perhaps President Putin is just trying to remind his own country that he is very much in control and in command and any mistakes that are happening in the country are due to those below him, Victor, Alisyn?

BLACKWELL: Yes. It certainly could be for the domestic audience, primarily. Scott McLean for us in Kyiv, thank you.

CAMEROTA: So back here this weekend, more than 15 million people will be under flood watches in northern and central California.

BLACKWELL: Already the first of three expected storm systems is drenching the state. Some parts are still underwater from the previous storms. In Central California, flooding from the Salinas River has turned fields - look at this - into lakes. Nearby cities now urging people to start making some evacuation plans.

CAMEROTA: CNN's Veronica Miracle is in the Bay Area. So what's the situation like around you, Veronica?

VERONICA MIRACLE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Alisyn and Victor, just a couple of hours ago, we were hit - getting hit with that first of three storms that has since moved east into central California. Now the big concern is the storm that's headed tomorrow, Saturday, the second of those three storms. That is what really as authorities concern because it is supposed to be the stronger storm.

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As you mentioned, more than 15 million people along the central California coastline are under a flood advisory. And this comes after a part of the region already experiencing flooding in the last couple of days. We were in Monterey yesterday where we saw homes underwater, fields completely underwater and authorities there are worried that this weekend, two major arteries into the Monterey Peninsula, two highways: Highway 1 and 68 could get completely flooded. And if those are flooded, then people will not be able to get in and out of the region. Emergency services will not be able to get in and out of that area and that could last potentially through Monday, so they are very concerned about that.

And then on Sunday, a third storm is expected to bring even more flooding and potentially rain. This comes after weeks of just the state being battered here with rain. Certainly the state after years of historic drought needs this water but at the pace and at the rate in which this water is coming down, it has been very damaging and destructive, 18 people already have died, including a five-year-old boy who was swept away in floodwaters, ripped from his mother's arms. His body still hasn't been recovered. Authorities very concerned that this weekend, there could be more damage and destruction. Alisyn, Victor?

CAMEROTA: It's just awful. Veronica Miracle, thank you.

So there are new details in the case of that missing Massachusetts mother, what she told police nine years ago about her husband.

BLACKWELL: And later, the U.S. government cannot explain more than 170 UFO sightings. Some even had unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities as they described.

CAMEROTA: Not surprised. We'll tell you about that.

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