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CNN This Morning

Trump Set to Testify in NY Civil Fraud Trial Monday; Hunter Biden Facing 9 New Charges; Russia Fires Missiles at Ukraine after 79- Day Pause. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired December 08, 2023 - 06:00   ET

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

ANDY SCHOLES, CNN SPORTS: And even do it a little bit less. So I can't fault them.

[06:00:03]

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: But --

SCHOLES: I wouldn't have gone publicly and said all these things, knowing that, well, the potential was there in the future.

HUNT: Yes, it does argue for holding your tongue. What do you think it means for golf?

SCHOLES: So, you know, Liv Golf and PGA, they have this December 31 deadline to strike a deal for whatever kind of merger they're going to have. What this signing of Rahm means, I don't know. But supposedly, that's a hard deadline.

So we'll have to wait and see by the end of the year what happens in the world of golf.

HUNT: It does seem to give Liv a little bit of an edge. All right. Thanks, Andy. Always good to see you. Have a great weekend.

Thanks to all of you for joining us. I'm Kasie Hunt. Have a wonderful weekend. CNN THIS MORNING starts right now.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Well, this breaking overnight, Hunter Biden is facing nine new criminal charges as federal investigators say he avoided paying $1.4 million in taxes, instead spending that money on an extravagant lifestyle. How high the political cost may be for his father.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: And former president, Donald Trump, set to testify Monday in his New York fraud trial after calling the case a, quote, "disgrace to America." Why his own lawyer is telling him not to take the stand.

Plus, shots fired outside of a New York synagogue before the first night of Hanukah. Hear what the suspect said just before he was arrested.

CNN THIS MORNING starts right now. HARLOW: Hey, everyone, it is Friday. We're so glad you're with us. I'm

Poppy Harlow with Phil Mattingly in New York.

And this morning, the 2023 campaign trail is running straight through the courthouse or courthouses.

Hunter Biden now facing nine new federal criminal charges. He is accused of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes, in 2016 through 2019, and instead spending his money on things like drugs, escorts, pornography, and luxury hotels.

MATTINGLY: Now, we should note, Hunter Biden is not Joe Biden. There is no allegation in the 56-page indictment that the president did anything wrong. He's not even mentioned.

But it could still have major implications for the incumbent as House Republicans have made Hunter's business dealings a basis for their impeachment inquiry push.

HARLOW: Former President Trump continues to face 91 criminal indictments, his legal team now working to delay his federal election subversion case. That is set right now to go to trial in March in the heat of the presidential election season.

And instead of being on the campaign trail yesterday, Trump chose to be in court for his New York civil fraud trial.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This whole case is a fraud. It's election interference. It's keeping me here instead of Iowa and New Hampshire.

And I should be right now in Iowa and New Hampshire, in South Carolina. I shouldn't be sitting in a courthouse. And I don't have to sit here. I could just do what I want -- whatever I want to do, but I want to make sure that you get the true story.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Just for a point of clarity, Trump was not required to be there yesterday. No one was keeping him there, instead of having him in Iowa. He chose to be there.

Joining us now, CNN senior crime and justice reporter Katelyn Polantz; CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig; and CNN political analyst Natasha Alford; and "New York Times" political correspondent Michael Bender, who's also the author of the "New York Times" best seller, "Frankly. We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost."

Katelyn, I want to start with you. These new charges against Hunter Biden, break them down. What do they actually mean?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, these are all charges about evading the IRS. It's nine charges. Three of them are felonies. We didn't have that before when he had that plea deal before it fell apart. Those were all misdemeanors.

These are felony charges, and they are essentially accusing Hunter Biden of either not telling the IRS what he needed to pay them, and then not paying them, or paying them late for the taxes that he owed, the federal income tax.

Now, the way that the Justice Department does this, the special counsel's office that filed this 56-page indictment against him yesterday, is they're not just explaining that he didn't pay his taxes. They're also saying he had the money. He didn't pay $1.4 million in taxes, and yet, had $7 million in income throughout the period of 2016 to 2019 when he needed to have these taxes being paid.

And they're also detailing in exquisite detail exactly what he was spending his money on: things like drugs, and escorts and girlfriends, rental properties, luxury hotels, pornography, exotic cars. These are all things that are in this indictment.

That is something that is quite a surprise to see, and they're using Hunter Biden's own memoir against him, quoting from it, saying -- showing how he was saying and writing, This is what I was spending my money on.

HARLOW: Yes, and he continued to do it, even after 2019, they allege. In 2020, he was spending all this money on a luxury house, right, Katelyn, and not -- and it's always interesting they wrote the IRS to be the last creditor to be paid.

[06:05:05]

What is worst case, best case for Hunter Biden out of this?

POLANTZ: Well, best case is that his attorneys go just totally all-in on fighting these charges before anything gets to a trial in any way that he can, and getting them tossed in some way.

One of the things that we know that they want to do is they want to ask the courts to recognize that he had a deal with the Justice Department, that they couldn't bring charges like this. That's something they're clearly going to test in court.

There's also the possibility that they can go to court and fight these. We got a quote from his attorney, Abbe Lowell, yesterday. He said, "If Hunter Biden's last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware and now California would not have been brought."

MATTINGLY: Elie, build off that point.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes.

MATTINGLY: Is that true?

HONIG: I don't think so. I think it may be true with respect to -- remember, there's another case. There's a gun case out of Delaware that deals with Hunter Biden possessing a firearm five years ago for about two weeks, and it ends up in a Dumpster. He never uses it. I have serious questions about whether DOJ would ever bring a case like that against anyone else. I would not have authorized that charge.

This tax case is different, though. This is $1.4 million in alleged tax loss, which is not a blockbuster case by federal tax crimes standards, but it's not nothing either. It's a fairly routine type of DOJ tax case.

And it's really important to understand, we're in a different stratosphere now with this new indictment than we were before with respect to Hunter Biden's tax problems.

Let's remember: back in July, Hunter Biden walked into court and was minutes away from pleading to two tax misdemeanors with a probation sentence.

Now he's looking at three felonies plus six misdemeanors. The maximum charge, if you add them all up -- no one ever gets near the maximum -- 17 years. He's not going to get anywhere, even worst-case scenario, anywhere near 17.

HARLOW: He might get some?

HONIG: If he gets convicted, if he goes to trial, and his lawyers seem very much intent on fighting this, as is their right. If he gets convicted at trial, it is very likely going to be a prison sentence of some duration. Not 17 years, but this is not a probation case.

POLANTZ: I mean, lots of people you've never heard of go to jail for federal tax crime.

HARLOW: Yes. Michael, this is a complete collision course between, you know, the -- the political system and the legal system. What's fascinating is, for the both the president's son and for the former president, all at the same time.

MICHAEL BENDER, AUTHOR, "FRANKLY, WE DID WIN THIS ELECTION": Yes, I can't recall a time where the legal and political systems have been on this kind of crash course. I think politically, normally, the American people are less likely to penalize a candidate for his family's charges.

And you'd think, in a normal world, all these charges against Hunter Biden might take some steam out of the Republican argument that Joe Biden has weaponized the Justice Department against his -- against his political enemies.

But the keyword there is, in a normal time, you've got to keep in mind that weaponizing the justice system isn't just an accusation right now from President Trump, it's also a campaign promise for a second term.

NATASHA ALFORD, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, and just to jump in, you know, this question of, does the president's son receive preferential treatment? The majority of Americans back in June said yes. But again, it fell along partisan lines. So this can disrupt narratives, but at the same time, I think to your

point, most people are not going to hold Joe Biden accountable for this.

MATTINGLY: Listen to what David Axelrod told our colleague Anderson Cooper last night. It was an interesting perspective.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID AXELROD, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: There's going to be a major effort to depict these as politically motivated charges. And so, you know, it's kind of ironic, because you see both sides trying to do that.

And in essence, this serves -- this serves Donald Trump's purposes, because he'd love to muddy the waters and suggest that the whole system is a swamp, and -- and point fingers in a lot of different directions.

So it's -- it's just one more thing that's going to make it a messy -- a messy, messy campaign year.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Mike, to that point, you talk to Democrats, their frustration is not that they think the president did anything wrong here. Their frustration is that this just gives Trump one of those threads that he's going to blow into something that everyone is going to believe, or his people are going to believe. And it's just going to make it more complicated for the White House.

BENDER: I think that's right. Just look back a few months ago to how Republicans reacted to the first set of charges against Hunter Biden.

James Comer, the chairman of House Oversight, kind of brushed it off in kind of conspiracy tones, saying, ironically, this is the one crime you can't tie Joe Biden to, is the gun charges.

So I think that -- I think we're going to see more of that this time around. And certainly, Trump will use this as a -- as just more muck to -- to muddy the waters on this corruption.

HARLOW: In terms of, Katelyn, the impeachment inquiry, James Comer, the Oversight chairman, said this, quote: "Hunter Biden's corporate entities, implicated by today's indictments, funneled foreign cash that landed in Joe Biden's bank account. Unless U.S. Attorney Weiss investigates everyone involved in Biden's fraud schemes and influence peddling, it will be clear President Biden's DOJ is protecting Hunter Biden and the big guy." He means the president there.

Can you just lay out the facts for us?

POLANTZ: The -- the House has been investigating this, and they really haven't found any of those connections in a way that really would have a problem for --

HARLOW: And by the House, you mean Comer's committee?

POLANTZ: Yes, specifically. And then, in this, you are seeing evidence here that the Justice Department, the special counsel has investigated, extensively tracing this money; that they looked into the foreign work that Hunter Biden was doing on the border of Burisma and Ukraine for a Romanian businessman, for some entities in China, as well as other investments.

And so they've looked at it. It doesn't show up here. There isn't a Biden -- Joe Biden connection in this indictment.

HARLOW: Thank you. Everyone, stay close. We've got a lot more to get to. Donald Trump's trials back in the spotlight today, as well. He goes back to the civil fraud trial. He'll be in the courtroom here in New York, and he could do something his legal team says he should not.

MATTINGLY: And overnight, two rockets hit the American embassy in Baghdad. Who the U.S. believes is responsible. We'll have it next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTINGLY: You are looking at the beautiful New York City skyline this morning. It is the holidays. It looks wonderful outside. And we're showing you that, not just because it look great but also because it is going to become front and center in the political and legal convergence that will be happening next week.

Donald Trump using that $250 million civil fraud trial in New York to raise money for his 2024 campaign and to widen his commanding lead.

Trump, again, called the case a, quote, "political witch hunt" Thursday after an accounting expert testified he saw no evidence whatsoever for accounting fraud. Trump is set to testify again in his own defense on Monday.

[06:15:12]

HARLOW: But as the Republican frontrunner campaigns from the courtroom, his Republican rivals are hitting the more traditional campaign trail after the fourth debate, which Trump also skipped.

Kristen Holmes joins us now with more. Good morning to you.

Talk about the strategy here. He doesn't have to be in that courtroom; he wants to be in that courtroom.

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Poppy and Phil.

That's absolutely right. He wants to take control of the narrative to hijack -- hijack these court cases and really turn them into campaign stops.

As you noted, he did not have to be there yesterday, but it did create an opportunity for him to really take control of the narrative the day after a Republican debate that he did not participate in, gave him ample camera time. He went to the camera at every opportunity that he had.

It also shed light on a witness who was very favorable to the former president and likely wouldn't have gotten as much attention, had the former president not been sitting in court.

Now, on Monday, again, he is expected to be called to testify by his own attorneys. Here's what one of his attorneys had to say about that appearance.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALINA HABBA, TRUMP ATTORNEY: He still wants to take the stand, even though my advice is, at this point, you should never take the stand with a gag order, but he is so firmly against what is happening in this court.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: Now, I do believe that, if Donald Trump was told very seriously by his attorneys not to take the stand, as he has been on multiple occasions, he would likely not. However, he is taking it, and he will be the final word in this case.

Remember, he could have been cross-examined by his own attorneys last time when he was up on the stand when he was the prosecution's witness, and chose not to be. They did not ask him any questions. So now, they will be giving him the last word in this trial.

HARLOW: They have more latitude when they do it.

Now, what can we expect to hear from him on the stand on Monday?

HOLMES: Well, remember, this is him taking control, again. There were a lot of things that he tried to say when he was being cross-examined or when he was being questioned by the prosecution, that they stopped him from saying. He got into a contentious back and forth with the judge. He kept saying, Answer these questions more succinctly.

We do expect him to be able to tell his narrative at this. Remember, again, this is something that his attorneys will be leading him on. They will be the ones doing the questioning, which means he will have a lot more room there to say what he needs to say and wants to say.

MATTINGLY: All right. Kristen Holmes, thank you.

HARLOW: Our experts back with us.

Elie Honig, it makes sense why the lawyers would do it this way. Because now they can ask him more. He can say more. But what does he risk being on that stand?

HONIG: Well, first of all, any competent lawyer on the planet would tell Donald Trump you are taking the Fifth. You are not taking the stand.

And Alina Habba's explanation there makes no sense. She says the reason why I advised him not to take the stand is because you have a gag order? That gag order applies equally --

HARLOW: Yes.

HONIG: -- inside and outside the courtroom. It makes no difference if he's on the stand. The reason you tell Donald Trump, You're not taking the stand is you have four pending indictments. And anything he says in this case on the stand can absolutely be used against him.

So by taking the stand, he risks anything that the A.G.'s office wants to cross-examine him on. Remember, they're going to go second here, right? His own lawyers are going to question him first. But then the A.G.'s lawyers get to stand up, and they can cross-examine him. Not necessarily on anything in the world, but on anything relating to this case, which gets into his finances which are relevant to, for example, the hush-money case.

So he's absolutely taking a risk by taking the stand.

MATTINGLY: Natasha, the way that the legal and political have crashed into one another here pretty dramatically and are going to more so in the months ahead, we've talked about it constantly. But I'm intrigued. Trump has clearly fully embraced this as a campaign strategy. Is that because he has no other option or because they think it's working?

ALFORD: I mean, I think it's a -- it's a dream opportunity, right? So many Americans are consumed with just trying to survive in the economy. They're getting their kids to school. They're making breakfast. They're not keeping up with every single charge. I don't even think they could explain to you all of the charges.

But they do pay attention when a sound bite goes viral, when Donald Trump uses his charisma and his skill to speak directly to MAGA supporters and to make himself a victim.

So again, I think this is a dream opportunity. He may not even listen to legal advice if it was the right advice, this is about the campaign. This is an opportunity for him to leave that lasting final word.

HARLOW: What about voters in a state like Iowa? They really care about you being there, they really care about you spending time with them and shaking hands. Same thing in New Hampshire.

And he is saying outside yesterday the courtroom, I could be in Iowa, I could be in New Hampshire, I'm here, et cetera. A smart political calculation for those two first states?

BENDER: Yes, I mean, I think so. You're right about Iowans, and Trump was penalized a little bit in 2016 for skipping a debate there. This time, it's a little bit different. I mean, this is -- in 2016 it was a Republican Party in transition. Now this is eight years.

HARLOW: Now it's his party?

BENDER: Now it's his party. And we've seen over the course of the year -- I mean, it's a little hard to remember, but just at the beginning of this year, he and DeSantis, the governor of Florida, were neck and neck in polls.

Trump has solidified his standing in polls, and largely in part because of these indictments, these investigations, and these trials. And the way this calendar lines up, this could only help him -- it looks like it can help him moving forward.

The civil trial looks like it will wrap up right before Iowa. The opening of a civil trial into a defamation case against -- involving E. Jean Carroll, whether he owes her money, starts the day after Iowa.

The subversion trial in Washington is set to start right on Super Tuesday, one of the most important dates.

These could help Trump in the primary. Now, how these play out with general election voters, is going to be a whole other question. We'll watch the next six months.

MATTINGLY: Something I've been curious about as I've watched him with this civil case. So -- is there a differentiation between how he can act in this being a civil case, versus what Mike's talking about, March 4, the launch of the subversion case, as it currently is scheduled the day before Super Tuesday is a federal case.

That case put new restrictions on him or different restrictions on him in terms of being able to do these types of press conferences every day.

POLANTZ: It all depends on the judge. One of the things that is different in this case than others is that there are cameras right outside the courtroom catching him coming in and out talking.

There's not cameras in the courtroom showing him on the stand.

In the Georgia, Fulton County case, there will be cameras in the courtroom if and when that goes to trial, eventually. I don't believe there's a date set yet firmly.

In federal court, there are no cameras inside the building, period, ever. Not going to happen, to my very deep disappointment.

MATTINGLY: Same.

POLANTZ: Right.

MATTINGLY: We're all aligned on this.

HARLOW: Samesies.

POLANTZ: But, there are a lot of different approaches the judges take to this.

In this case, he has not just tried to filibuster his responses to prosecutors when he was on the stand before. He also tried to make it about how the judge was being so unfair to him.

This judge, that dynamic, is one that's particular to this case. He has a very different dynamic with Judge Aileen Cannon in the federal court in Florida. They are not adversarial at this point, at least between his lawyers and her so far. Gotten a lot of rulings they like from her.

In federal court in Washington, Judge Tanya Chutkan, she doesn't -- she doesn't let a lot of things slide. She is having really tight deadlines. She's being very strict, and so her tolerance for -- for shenanigans might not be very high.

HONIG: I don't know if Katelyn realizes this. She's going to be our human camera inside the federal courtroom. This is how we're going to find out about --

MATTINGLY: I think she knows.

POLANTZ: For sure.

HARLOW: Thank you, guys, very much.

MATTINGLY: Well, Russia launching a fierce round of missile attacks on Ukraine as Congress battles over funding for the country. We're going to go live on the ground, next.

HARLOW: Also, new video shows the confrontation that ended the deadly shooting Wednesday at UNLV. It shows a gunman walking past police before he was killed in a gunfight. Police are still trying to determine a motive.

Officials say the suspect applied for several jobs at colleges in Nevada, was rejected by them. And officers uncovered a target list that included UNLV faculty. None of them were shot. Three people, though, were murdered, including two professors.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:27:04]

HARLOW: Breaking news, Russia launched a barrage of cruise missiles on Kyiv and Eastern Ukraine after a nearly three-month pause there. Ukrainian officials say many of the missiles were intercepted, but this comes as more U.S. aid hangs in the balance for Ukraine.

Nick Paton Walsh is live in Eastern Ukraine and joins us now. It just shows the urgency of getting this aid to Ukraine, to be able to defend -- defend itself. It's been an almost 80-day pause in terms of that region. I wonder what changed.

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, initially, there were four (ph) Russia supply of cruise missiles it used as dawn broke this morning against Kyiv and other targets. That might be a limited supply, but they appeared -- managed to find 19. But they could fire in one go.

As you say, Ukraine says they took down 15 of those, only debris falling on the capital. But one killed in Dnipropetrovsk, not far from where I'm standing. Four injured there, as well, in a separate series of attacks using S-300 missiles in the Eastern city of Kharkiv. Killed one in the region and injured two in this city.

So again, a fear amongst Ukrainians that we're going to see the winter attacks against crucial infrastructure picking up again as perhaps the frontline fighting snows -- slows because of the awful weather around me.

But these air defenses that Ukraine has relied upon and relied upon so acutely last night -- a relatively low death toll -- are, the White House say, potentially the first things that will suffer if aid is not continued at the pace they've become used to over the past nearly two years of this war.

The last announcement we saw from the pentagon was $175 million, a lot you might say, but significantly less than the billions we've been accustomed to seeing every other week being announced by the White House in aid.

That may slow the air defenses available to Ukraine. That will embolden Russia. It will also, the White House has suggested, mean some of the key 155 artillery shells that are really -- make so much the bulwark of Ukraine's offensive and defensive power here, that they become in scarcer supply, too.

But really, the most important thing here, Poppy, Phil, is the signal that the U.S. is giving. They're showing for the first time that aid is not inevitable. That is palpably felt here on the ground in Ukraine.

Soldiers we're talking to deeply concerned about the months ahead and Russia regaining its footing.

And the argument many make on the Hill there, that they won't to get caught up in another conflict here, well, really that aid is exactly what is keeping U.S. out of the war in a more full -- full fashion, allowing Ukraine to do the fighting for them.

So a vital argument being made by Ukraine, and deep anxiety here as to what comes next -- Poppy, Phil.

HARLOW: Nick Paton Walsh in Eastern Ukraine, thank you very much.

MATTINGLY: Well, elite universities facing new backlash over their presidents' testimony about antisemitism on campus. Big-name donors and alums are increasing the pressure for them to resign.

HARLOW: But first, meteorologist Allison Chinchar tracking a trio of weather threats millions of Americans are facing this weekend. What do you see?