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Today, Trump Aide Set to be Arraigned in Classified Documents Case; Former Trump Arizona House Speaker Spoke With the FBI in 2020 Election Interference Investigation; Lukashenko Says, Wagner Boss in Russia, Not Belarus as Agreed. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired July 06, 2023 - 07:00   ET

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

[07:00:02]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: The previously redacted information reveals the FBI obtained surveillance video of Nauta moving dozens of boxes in and out of a storage room before the Justice Department showed up to retrieve any and all classified documents that Trump had.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: Meanwhile, Arizona's former House speaker made some big news on CNN last night about the special counsel's investigation into the 2020 election interference.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: We talked about your call with Trump and with Giuliani, as you mentioned there, they were both on that phone call. Have you been subpoenaed by the special counsel?

STATE REP. RUSTY BOWERS (R-AZ): I -- that is a great question. I'm hesitant to talk about any subpoenas, et cetera, but I have been interviewed by the FBI.

COLLINS: In the January 6 investigation? Excuse me, in the effort to overturn the election results.

BOWERS: Correct. It was four hours of a discussion that they had with me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: Now, remember the former Republican House speaker, Rusty Bowers, refused to bow to intimidation and attempts to get him to back efforts in the legislature to decertify Biden's 2020 victory in Arizona. He testified before the January 6th House select committee about phone calls he received from Rudy Giuliani and former President Trump.

CNN Senior Crime and Justice Reporter Katelyn Polantz has the latest for us. We will get to that in a minute, but, first, we're coming up on Walt Nauta's hearing this morning. What should we know?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Right. So, the co-defendant of Donald Trump accused of obstruction and making false statements, he is set to be in court this morning.

Short and sweet is what we expect this proceeding to be. He needs to enter his pleading of not guilty. That has been expected for a long time now. And finally today, he think that that's going to be happening, where there will be a lawyer showing up with Nauta, that's a possibility Nauta is there himself.

But this proceeding, it puts the focus on this co-defendant of Donald Trump, a man who is so aligned with him that they are rarely seen apart whenever Trump is traveling for political reasons. Trump is not going to be there at the hearing today. But this is really highlighting how Walt Nauta is a defendant on his own. And so he is going to be kicking off this proceeding to head towards trial entering that initial pleading.

But also these two men are so aligned. They both want to go to trial, sources are telling me, that is the plan for both of them, Trump and Nauta, both even if their interests could diverge at some point. And Trump has been very looped in on Walt Nauta's legal defense approach, who his lawyers might be, his defense team is fully clued in, and also Donald Trump is going to be paying for Walt Nauta's lawyering going forward, or at least entities that Trump controls will be doing so.

HARLOW: So that's the classified documents probe. The other probe Special Counsel Jack Smith is overseeing in terms of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, that probe got more interesting last night with news that Rusty Bowers, the former Arizona House speaker, Republican, talked to the FBI for four hours. Why does that matter so much?

POLANTZ: It did. I mean, this is one of those people that you would expect criminal investigators looking into the efforts this battleground states to overturn Joe Biden's wins there and put Trump into power. You would expect them to reach out to someone like Rusty Bowers. But we didn't know that he had actually spoken to investigators and what he had spoken to investigators about.

And what Rusty Bowers said he had talked to investigators about were calls he had directly with Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump after the election, where they were pressuring him and he was saying, no, show me evidence of election fraud, and they couldn't do it. And so he is just another person now in Arizona that, like others in its investigation, has talked about the direct calls that they received from Trump.

We know just in recent weeks Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in Georgia who got that call from Trump to find votes in Georgia, he too was speaking to investigators. So, all this goes into this criminal investigation and whether they may want to charge Trump and others.

BLACKWELL: Katelyn Polantz setting the table with the reporting, thanks so much.

HARLOW: Let's talk about all of this, the legal implications, Elie Honig, our senior legal analyst, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, is here. Elie, good morning to you. Rusty Bowers, the significance?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, this is a big deal, Poppy. Let's remember, there has been so much focus on the state of Georgia. However, this was really a coordinated seven-state strategy. In fact, the state that was most closely contested, the narrowest margin of victory was Arizona. And we now know for sure that the feds are dug in and looking not just at Georgia but also at least at Arizona.

The big news from last night is that Rusty Bowers, the former Arizona House speaker, a longtime Republican who actually supported Donald Trump in 2020, we learned last night on Kaitlan Collins' show that he has been interviewed by the FBI in the special counsel investigation for four hours, as we just talked about.

[07:05:11]

That is a huge deal.

And to get a sense of what he talked about, he told Kaitlan that he was asked about Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman. But let's flashback to almost exactly a year ago today when Rusty Bowers testified in front of the House January 6th committee. Let's listen to what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): At some point, did one of them make a comment that they didn't have evidence but they had a lot of theories?

BOWERS: That was Mr. Giuliani.

He said, we've got lots of theories, we just don't have the evidence. And I don't know if that was a gaffe or maybe he didn't think through what he said.

But I said what would you have me do? And he said, just do it and let the court sort it out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HONIG: So, crucial testimony there from Rusty Bowers, and, again, we now know that he has spoken with Jack Smith's team.

BLACKWELL: Let's stay in Arizona. We learned yesterday that the Arizona Secretary of State's Office has been subpoenaed by the special counsel. What do we need to know there?

HONIG: Yes, so really important. This is a subpoena, meaning that the Arizona secretary of state has to turn over documents to the special counsel team.

Now, what could they be looking at? Let's remember one of the key focuses of the DOJ investigation is this fake elector scheme. We hear that phrase all the time. Here is what it actually means. These same seven states that we talked about before, each of them submitted a purported slate of electors, documents. They sent it into the Archives, to the Senate, saying we are the duly elected electors for Donald Trump. Donald Trump didn't win any of those seven states, Joe Biden did.

And so we know that DOJ has spoken with some of the people who signed and claimed to be electors. We don't know exactly who. We know they have been given immunity, which tells me that DOJ sees those electors as witnesses and thinks that their testimony is relevant to their ongoing criminal investigation.

HARLOW: Elie, also, this is comes days after The Washington Post reported that Trump tried to pressure then-Governor Doug Ducey. But as far as we know, and maybe something changed in the last few days, they haven't talked to him yet?

HONIG: Yes. So, that's really interesting. And, again, things may change. We just learned about 12 hours ago about the interview involving Rusty Bowers. Doug Ducey was the governor of Arizona at the time. We know that he received calls from Donald Trump about trying to overturn the election. It is curious to me if DOJ hasn't spoken to him. Any witness list that includes Rusty Bowers should also include Governor Ducey. So, next time he is on air, someone needs to ask him if he has spoken with the FBI or he has been subpoenaed either.

HARLOW: Okay. Elie, head back to the table. Let's talk about all of this. CNN Senior Political Analyst and Anchor John Avlon is back along with CNN Political Commentator and Host of PBS' Firing Line Margaret Hoover. Great to have you both here.

Margaret, let me begin with you and the significance of this for the probe, because, I think, obviously, it tells us it is getting bigger.

MARGARET HOOVER, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It's getting bigger. And the first thing I thought of, you know, the last official entity that tried to put all of these disparate pieces of open source information that we the public knew about was the January 6th commission. And this strikes me that they did a real favor to the public by threading all of the -- putting all of these different pieces of data together this one narrative and DOJ is now following all of that but with the gears of justice behind it, right? This is no longer an accusation from a House committee that doesn't have any more authority other than to put the story together in one piece, this is now the Justice Department.

HARLOW: Yes, and led by a guy who has prosecuted Democrats and Republicans before.

BLACKWELL: John, context?

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, I mean, Margaret is exactly right, that the Jan. 6 committee actually got this ball moving. DOJ was a little slow to pick it up, frankly. But now, since Jack Smith has been appointed, and thank you for pointing out that he's got a record of being clear and impartial investigator, because, of course, that comes under attack in our partisan era, things are really accelerating. And I think folks have focused on Georgia but they have forgotten about the other six states. They've forgotten about the complete sort of clown car crash of Arizona in terms of that desperate searching for voter fraud, where there was none.

And so this is -- sometimes we forget because we get caught up in the day to day. There is nothing quite like this in American history, this attempt to overturn an election by a sitting president. And what they seem to be zeroing in on is the question of intent. And that is where it all comes to bear.

HONIG: And there has been a notable shift in the pace, intensity, focus of this investigation since Jack Smith became special counsel in November. So, we're going on eight months or so now.

A year ago now, we were in the midst of those, I think, really important January 6th committee hearings, and a lot of folks were saying, where is DOJ? Why is DOJ getting beat to the punch on witnesses like Rusty Bowers, like Cassidy Hutchinson, which they did get beat to the punch, and, frankly, that's on Merrick Garland.

Ever since Jack Smith took over, he's been doing exactly the kind of things that people were saying, where is Merrick Garland on this.

[07:10:02]

And, look, he has now spoken to a lot of different crucial people up to and including Mike Pence.

And so I do think his decision day is drawing near. We don't know when, but it has to be soon.

BLACKWELL: This Pence ad that John thinks is the biggest domestic political story of the day, and I should say it is the pro-Pence PAC. Say that three times fast. Let's play a bit of it. Do we have it?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: America doesn't stand with thugs and dictators. We confront them or at least we used to.

RONALD REAGAN, FORMER U.S PRESIDENT: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

MIKE PENCE, FORMER U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: There can be to room in the leadership of the Republican Party for apologists for Putin. There can only be room for champions of freedom.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: Post-Pence vice presidency says all of what his former boss did with Kim Jong-un and Putin is bad. What do you think about this ad for the PAC?

HOOVER: So, I read Mike Pence's biography that came out just a few months ago, or a year ago maybe. I interviewed Mike Pence on my program on PBS. I did it so John Avlon didn't have to. So, I understand why he is surprised.

But the truth is it was very clear as Mike Pence was writing his campaign document that is his biography that this is the place he was going to differentiate himself from Donald Trump apart from January 6th. It was all going to be about foreign policy.

He makes the point of telling the story about how he went up to Vladimir Putin so Vladimir Putin would know the guy beside Donald Trump knew that they had interfered in the 2016 election. He makes a point of telling the stories about each of the dictators that he had interactions with, how his interactions differentiated from Donald Trump's interactions with them, that he didn't tolerate, as the president, the fawning nature that Donald Trump had with dictators around the world.

So, I am not at all surprised that this is -- while the PAC does it and it is not sanctioned, it is not coordinated, this narrative was blasted in Mike Pence's autobiography.

AVLON: And it is about time he started doing the broad side in public as opposed to in the pages of his book. I appreciate your brush-back pitch early in the morning. But I think it is a big deal that he is drawing that contrast really clearly in an ad, albeit through a PAC, because, as Margaret said, this is a point of clear differentiation on conviction. And the fact that he didn't make those noises in public during the administration.

BLACKWELL: Yes, not execution, conviction maybe.

AVLON: Yes. But, good, that this is a clear contrast that should be drawn. This is a complete contradiction of decades of, frankly, bipartisan foreign policy, where American presidents don't kiss up to dictators.

HOOVER: But I will give you credit. He never --

AVLON: How about that.

HOOVER: He never dismisses the things Donald Trump did. He never disassociates himself from the record of Donald Trump. But he just gets a little bit of air.

HARLOW: What did he say after Helsinki, for example, that press conference, or what did he say or really not say after that Trump/Bill O'Reilly interview about equivocating, right?

AVLON: No place for Putin apologists except --

BLACKWELL: I mean, he sat in the box at the olYmpics with Kim Jong- un's sister. There was no like direct face-to-face there.

HOOVER: Well, he writes about that in his book, and he makes a very clear point of orchestrating that in a way that sent a very clear signal. That's what he says in his book.

BLACKWELL: John, Margaret, Elie, thank you all. HARLOW: We now know where the Wagner chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is at least said to be this hour. And it is not Belarus. We'll tell you weeks after his failed mutiny.

BLACKWELL: Plus, overnight, at least four people were killed, dozens more injured in Lviv. A Russian military strike hits a residential area. We're live in Ukraine.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:15:00]

BLACKWELL: A dramatic turn of events this morning for the Russian mercenary leader accused of launching a rebellion. The president of Belarus tells our own Matthew Chance that Yevgeny Prigozhin is in Russia, in St. Petersburg, instead of being in exile in Belarus.

Meanwhile, Russian state media reports that police raided Prigozhin's properties in St. Petersburg just last week. The Russian government had claimed it was dropping charges against him. But this morning, the Kremlin refused to comment on Prigozhin's whereabouts to CNN.

During the raids, Russian police say they uncovered statues of gold and money and guns and wigs and several passports allegedly belonging to the mercenary leader under different aliases.

We have team coverage from Washington to Ukraine, to Belarus this morning.

Let's start with Matthew Chants. He is live in Minsk. Of course, he spoke with President Lukashenko. Tell us more about what you learned, this bombshell that Prigozhin is in Russia.

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, it's absolutely stunning, isn't it? And I'm talking to you, of course, from the Palace of Independence, which is this extraordinary marble edifice in the middle of Minsk Square, which is one of the offices of Alexander Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus.

And he gathered a few journalists around, me included, to in what he said for a conversation, he said, about the recent dramatic events. And I asked him, what about Wagner? What is happening with this supposed deal that he brokered to end that military standoff Russia last week and give Yevgeny Prigozhin, who's the Wagner leader, and his fighters, exile in exchange for them calling off that uprising?

Take a listen to what Lukashenko had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHANCE: I wonder if you could provide us all with a bit of an update on the whereabouts of the Wagner leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Is he in Belarus or not?

ALEKSANDR LUKASHENKO, BELARUSIAN PRESIDENT: In terms of Yevgeny Prigozhin, he is in St. Petersburg, or maybe this morning, he would travel to Moscow or elsewhere, but he is not on the territory of Belarus now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[07:20:00]

CHANCE: Well, he's not in Belarus, and that, of course, contradicts the statements that the Belarusian leader had made in the past that he was in Belarus. And it throws open the whole question is, is this deal that was negotiated to end the Wagner uprising last week, is it being renegotiated? Because state television in Russia earlier today is broadcasting images of what they say is a police raid at Yevgeny Prigozhin's house in St. Petersburg, at least one of them. They've seized gold bars, cash, passports with fake names on it, apparently belonging to Yevgeny Prigozhin, and wigs, presumably used for disguise.

It's a whole sort of process, a crackdown, it seems, on anything to do with Wagner, anything to do with Yevgeny Prigozhin. And it doesn't bode well for the man who headed Wagner, of course, still headed, but who led that rebellion against the Kremlin. And so we'll see what happens in the future.

Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, saying he does not know what's going to happen, but he did say he did not think that Putin would kill Prigozhin. He said that's not something he believes will happen. But the very fact he raised that possibility of Prigozhin being killed does not bode well for the Wagner leader.

BLACKWELL: There were so many questions about Prigozhin's future before this news conference. This, of course, creates many more. Matthew, stay with us.

HARLOW: Ukrainian officials say four people are dead, many more are injured this morning after a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in Lviv. Rescue teams are digging through the rubble right now, trying to find anyone trapped inside. The city's mayor says dozens of homes and cars were also damaged. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is promising a, quote, tangible response.

Our Ben Wedeman joins us live from Eastern Ukraine. Ben, how are the rescues going so far?

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, they've been doing this since about 3:00 in the morning, local time, just after the dismissal hit. And at the moment, the death toll is at least four with at least 37 injured. Among the dead is a 21-year-old journalist, a woman. And also among the dead is a 95-year-old woman who survived the Second World War. This is being described as the most devastating attack on civilians in Lviv.

This is a city in the far west of Ukraine. It's considered one of the safer areas, and therefore lots of people have actually fled to Lviv in the hopes that they would be safer. But, clearly, this underscores that, really, there's nowhere in Ukraine that's safe.

Now, another thing that's come out is that as many as ten bomb shelters in Lviv were locked shut when this happened. And, therefore, there's an investigation into why they were shut, partially, probably because so many people didn't expect Lviv to be targeted in this way.

Now, also significant, it was a Kalibr missile that hit the building. The Kalibr is a Russian hypersonic missile that's very accurate. It carries a payload of more than a thousand pounds of high explosives. It's that exact kind of rocket that hit the restaurant here in Kramatorsk last week, killing 13 people.

HARLOW: Wow. And, Ben, before you go, I understand you spoke with several captured Russian soldiers near Bakhmut recently. What did they tell you?

WEDEMAN: Well, they told us stories of an army, or at least an army of convicts that are on the frontlines that only received two weeks of basic training compared to, for instance, the U.S. Army has ten weeks of basic training, that they didn't have enough supplies, they didn't have enough weapons, they had very little food. Their commanders were oftentimes under the influence of drugs and were given nonsensical orders.

It really paints a picture of disorder in the Russian ranks. There seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Two of the prisoners we spoke to had been convicted of drug charges, and the only way they got out of prison was to sign up for these six months contracts.

So, it really paints a picture of an army that's not too impressive.

HARLOW: It absolutely does. That is startling. Ben, thank you for the reporting on both fronts.

BLACKWELL: Matthew Chance is back with us now, along with CNN Contributor and former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Daugherty, and former CIA Chief of Russia Operations Steve Hall.

Steve, let me start with you. If this is true, from Belarusian President Lukashenko, that Prigozhin is in St. Petersburg, not in Belarus, what does this tell you about the deal?

[07:25:06]

What does this suggest about Putin's decisions and moves forward?

STEVE HALL, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Putin still must be asking himself, how do I solve a problem like Prigozhin? I mean, there was a plan initially, which now, after Lukashenko has spoken, appears not to be the neatly tied package that all of us were presented last week. And so the real question is, why is Prigozhin even still alive at this particular point?

I mean, let's review what he's done. His troops marched halfway to Moscow, killing a bunch of Russian servicemen who attacked him on the way. He publicly criticized Putin's real reason for invading Ukraine, which supposedly rid the country of Nazism and NATO threats and all sorts of other nonsense. He's called all of that into question. Any single one of these things would seem to have would have, under normal circumstances, spelled the doom of Prigozhin, and yet he still lives. It's possible that he has more power than Putin would want him to. He was received very well in Rostov, and he might indeed have some supporters in Moscow, else why would he have simply decided to send his troops to march up the road to try to get there?

So, a lot of questions still out there, but I think Putin doesn't exactly know what to do with him at this point.

HARLOW: Well, Jill, you know Russia. You know Putin 23 years in power and his mind better than so many people. Why do you think Prigozhin is still alive?

JILL DOUGHERTY, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I think Putin has got two problems. He's got Prigozhin and he's got Prigozhin's men, the Wagner people. So, what do you do with Prigozhin?

Prigozhin is kind of a rock star, at least publicly in Russia for a while, winning battles, taking Bakhmut, et cetera, but he's also very valuable. He was very valuable to Putin because he ran this big operation that is literally around the world, especially in conflict zones. And also, we can't forget running the troll factory in St. Petersburg that interfered in the American election in 2016.

So, this guy had a lot of power. And, of course, that is a problem when he goes -- has rebellion against Putin. So, I think what you're doing is the deal was organized ultimately by Putin, that deal with Lukashenko.

Lukashenko, as a proper Soviet-era guy, is saying, well, I don't know what's going on. So, Prigozhin is apparently back in St. Petersburg. Why? That's where his office is. That's where his residence is. And I think what they're probably going to do is prosecute him for corruption. And you see that playing out on Russian T.V.

And then you have to, of course, figure out what to do with Wagner, which is another issue. It's very valuable. But back to the basic, Putin created this. Putin created this because it is a product of all of the corruption of his government.

BLACKWELL: Matthew, I found it a bit ironic when you said you're standing in the Hall of Independence there in Minsk. Because one of the hallmarks of Lukashenko's involvement in the war has been his allyship with Putin, and some would call it subordinates.

HARLOW: People called him Putin's puppet.

BLACKWELL: Putin's puppet. Does this happen, this announcement, this confirmation from Lukashenko, without permission from Putin, without the direction from the Kremlin?

CHANCE: I mean, it's interesting what you say, because you're absolutely right. Increasingly, over the past couple of years, really, since 2020, when there was a big civil uprising here in Belarus, Lukashenko has become increasingly dependent on financial support from Moscow, on diplomatic support. He's been isolated by much of the rest of the world because of the terrible human rights record here.

And Putin is exploiting that, using Belarus as a launch pad, for instance, as one of the launch pads to strike at Ukraine at the beginning of the war, nearly a year-and-a-half ago, using Belarus to deploy tactical nuclear weapons, which are now apparently in place here in Belarus but controlled by Russia, but to further threaten the west.

And, of course, using Lukashenko. I suspect, although Lukashenko says it was his initiative, but I suspect, and many other people suspect, it was the Kremlin that forced Lukashenko to hold out that olive branch to Yevgeny Prigozhin last week to diffuse the immediate crisis.

I think there's a sense, to try and answer that question, about why is Prigozhin still alive. I genuinely believe that Putin fumbled this in the sense that he should have acted earlier to intervene, to diffuse the animosity between Prigozhin and the defense minister, and that chief of staff, Gerasimov and Shoigu, who he was criticizing fiercely. And he said is one of the reasons he went on this march to Moscow, as he calls his military uprising.

[07:30:04]

He didn't do that. It all blew up and got out of hand.